Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  He had spent an hour currying the horse and bedding him down in Royal Wind’s stable for upper-class carriage horses. Royal Wind was the son of a Virginia plantation owner whose property had been confiscated during the Civil War. He was bitter, pompous, and clean, and could be trusted not to divulge that Peter Lake was about. The stallion himself, never having seen such elegance in Brooklyn, was sleeping in the stable after a meal of fresh oats and sweet water. He was covered with a thick blanket of pure cashmere, and the bulb in his stall was shaded so that it would not shine in his eyes.

  Chases and struggles tire the heart and require long bouts of deep sleep. Peter Lake looked forward to a day or two of immobility on the vaulting. He would sleep well in the eternal twilight behind the sky, since all sound was reduced to the faint rush of faraway surf, there was plenty of fresh air, and privacy was assured. After running in bitter cold for the better part of a week, he slept in leaden stillness through the night, the following day, and the following night. He awoke in the morning, thirty-six hours later, breathing slowly and calmly, completely rested. With his strength renewed, he realized that he was ravenously hungry, and proceeded to cook an excellent bouillabaisse culled from cans of varied fish, tomatoes, wine, oil, and an enormous bottle of Saratoga spring water. After this, he bathed, shaved, and changed his clothes. There he was, like God in heaven or Emerson in his study, and he began to think and plan.

  I have this fine horse, he thought to himself, and have come to love him for his eyes and gentle face. He can jump the length of a city block, and he could no doubt take me deep into the pine barrens, or up to the Highlands, or out to Montauk, where Pearly doesn’t set foot. I could rest. But it would start all over when I came back again. And I’m rested. So I stay. But staying is much the same as running, because I always have to flee to the marsh or hide in lofts and cellars. What’s the difference? It’s the same as the Highlands or the pine barrens, but in miniature. There’s no way out unless I become someone else. Perhaps I can change enough—not so they won’t recognize me (they’ll always recognize me sooner or later), but so that they won’t care. If I became a nun, for example. They’d figure me for gone. Or if I were an ashman, or if I lost my legs, or if I found a devotion, a thing to get lost in even larger than the pine barrens. . . .

  They say that in his devotion St. Stephen changed form before the eyes of those who watched, that he could rise in the air, and be many things, that he knew the past and future, that he traveled from one time to another, though he was a simple man. All this (he thought, upraising his eyes and clearing his throat) is why they burned him.

  Now, I’m no St. Stephen, but if I can concentrate hard enough on something apart from me, perhaps I can be changed. Mootfowl said that those who built the bridge were changed. Did he mean what I think he meant? He said that the city changed, too, and, strike me, Mootfowl was not one to care about little things. What if I become a monk? They would be smashed with wonder! Then they would kill me. What if I became an alderman, or something like that? They would kill me sure, since otherwise they’d have to pay me. What if I became a sweet-tooth and danced in a theater? Oh Jesus, I could never do that. What if I lived underground . . . a hermit, no, blind? I couldn’t see them, but they could see me. Can I change into an animal? Never been done. Invisible! The scientists must have some sort of liquid. . . .

  Suddenly he froze, like a stag in the bush who hears a faraway breaking of branches. The years of being chased had sharpened his senses, and he had heard running footsteps, barely audible, far below. They had the greedy rhythm of the hunt. He peered through a star at the shiny marble floor a hundred feet beneath him, and watched a line of men divide as if they were horses in a military tattoo. They went for the two sets of stairs that led to the constellations.

  “Dead Rabbits!” he said. “That’s who they are, but why them?” He opened a hatch that was to have been used once in several decades to lower a cable for the scaffolding upon which a painter would stand to freshen the signs of the zodiac. He grabbed the end of the rope, and let himself fall. As the rope slowly played off the drum, Peter Lake descended silently through the cavernous space under the stars. He was afraid, though, that he had not left in time, and he was right, for as he glided smoothly past the halfway point the rope began to slow. Then it stopped. He dangled listlessly far above the floor. Though thousands moved below, none saw him.

  He couldn’t drop. It was too high for that: he would hit the marble floor like an egg. He thought of swinging to and fro to catch a ledge on one of the walls. But then the Dead Rabbits found the crank for the escape drum, and Peter Lake started upward. “Dead Rabbits,” he said. “Dead Rabbits. What a name.”

  Just before he reached the hatch (from which half a dozen Dead Rabbits were peering at him), he put his hand in the opening of a star, and swung apelike from it to another. Though it was almost impossible to hold on, he went hand over hand up the horn of Taurus, thinking to kick open another hatch and escape. With only three fingers in the last star, he started to raise himself for a kick. But the hatch opened and a bunch of Dead Rabbits appeared.

  His leg dropped. He looked down at the floor so very far away. The three fingers began to weaken. His grip failed, he slipped, and cried out as he felt himself beginning to fall. But a Dead Rabbit had pushed his arm through the hatch, and he grasped Peter Lake’s wrist as it flew past. The Dead Rabbit was strong. He pulled Peter Lake inside in one motion.

  Peter Lake thought that they would do him in immediately. Though he could hardly breathe, he asked, “Why didn’t you just let me fall? Does Pearly want me alive? Why Dead Rabbits?”

  One of the Dead Rabbits spoke up. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “We just want to talk.”

  Peter Lake closed his eyes in relief and disgust. “Tell me then, Dead Rabbit, what is it that you want to talk about?”

  “We heard that you got this horse, and they said that it could fly.”

  “Did they.”

  “Yes. They swear it flew. It’s all over the place now. We wanna buy the horse from you—for a good price—and put it in the circus.”

  “You stupid bastards. The horse can’t fly.”

  “Everyone says he can.”

  “He can jump, that’s all.”

  “How far?”

  “A block or so. Maybe two.”

  “Two blocks!”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’ll buy him, Peter Lake, and enter him at Belmont.”

  “No,” said Peter Lake. “You don’t understand. He wouldn’t jump for money. He does it ’cause he likes it, or for some reason or other, but he wouldn’t do it for money, if you know what I mean. That is, he won’t do it without me, and I won’t . . . and besides, he’s not for sale.”

  “We’ll give you ten thousand dollars.”

  “No.”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “No.”

  The Dead Rabbits looked at their chief, who had been hanging back amid the beams. “Fifty thousand,” he said.

  “Didn’t I tell you? He’s not for sale.”

  “Seventy-five, and that’s it!”

  “No.”

  “Eighty.”

  “Not selling.”

  “Okay, one hundred. But that’s all we can offer.”

  “Chicory,” Peter Lake said, “you could have a million, and it still wouldn’t do you any good.”

  When the Dead Rabbits had finally been convinced that Peter Lake was not going to part with the horse, they filed morosely down the stone steps that followed the hump of the vault. At that moment Peter Lake decided that he had been chased as much as he could be chased. “I’m getting out,” he said to himself, his lips taut with determination. “I’ll do anything to do it, but I’m getting out.

  “I’ll chew nails!” he screamed, and then added, very quietly, “if necessary.”

  Rather than chew nails, he decided to steal enough money so that he could set himself up and try to become something other, and pe
rhaps better, than what he was. He felt strongly that it could be done. Not only was there the lesson of St. Stephen, but there was the example of Mootfowl, who had worked all his life in a fury to transform and exceed himself. He had failed. But, on the way, he had seen, perhaps, in the curling and rolling of a molten red block of steel, what Peter Lake had seen in the eyes of the white horse.

  Peter Lake climbed an iron ladder to the outside roof. It was covered with knee-deep snow. The real stars blazed like faraway white flares and put to shame the imitations in the station ceiling: there were pinwheels of fire, round phosphorescent spirals of light. Peter Lake leaned into the wind while all around him the snow swirled in sparkling chains, their motion suspended and stilled, as in the stars. Deep within the high blazing tunnels, motion and stillness met and fused. The wind shrieking across the drifts on the station roof turned the snow to white vapor that flattened into spinning vortexes. Seen from afar, the city’s pulsating lights were like stars, and the distant avenues and high plumes of steam that curled and twisted were like the star roads themselves.

  “With all that I’ve seen,” Peter Lake said to himself, “I’ve seen nothing. The city is like an engine, an engine just beginning to fire itself up.” He could hear it. Its surflike roar matched the lights. Its ceaseless thunder was not for nothing.

  Beverly

  ISAAC PENN, publisher of The Sun, built his house in the middle of lots and fields on the Upper West Side, so that it stood alone overlooking the reservoir in Central Park. “I have no desire,” he had said, “to live with a bunch of dumbbells on Fifth Avenue. I was born in a little house in Hudson, not far from the wharves. There was noise twenty-four hours a day even before they put in the railroad, and loose pigs snorted around everywhere. Come to think of it, they do that in New York, too, but they wear waistcoats. That’s where we lived. We were poor. I remember that all the proper people lived in the same place, like a bunch of cigars in a pack. They were mostly dumbbells who had never thought a decent thought in their lives, so they banded together to hide it.

  “I like my house. It stands alone in the fresh air. My children like the house. They stand alone in the fresh air. I listen to them, not to Mrs. Astor—and she knows it.”

  Because Isaac Penn was so abrasive, outspoken, powerful, rich, wise, and old, the optometrist was very frightened when the master of the house himself met him at the door and escorted him in. He felt like a child who imagines that he is soon to be eaten by a huge unfriendly animal that lives in the dark. And, further, he could not understand why he had been summoned to appear with all his equipment at the Penns’ house. He had the real carriage trade, and his celebrated customers always came to the shop. He was puzzled as well to see that Isaac Penn wore no spectacles, which he thought most unusual for an old man whose business flowed before his eyes in small print.

  “Then we are not for you, I take it,” the optometrist said to Isaac Penn, who had gone to sit in an enormous leather chair. He could hardly make himself heard over the piano that was being played in an adjoining room.

  “What?” asked Isaac Penn.

  “We are not for you, then, I take it.”

  “Who’s we?” asked Isaac Penn, looking around the room.

  “You don’t need glasses yourself, sir, do you?”

  “No,” said Isaac Penn, still wondering if the optometrist had brought an assistant. “Never needed glasses. Grew up looking for whales. Glasses wouldn’t have been the thing.”

  “Is it your wife that needs spectacles, Mr. Penn?”

  “Dead,” said Isaac Penn. The optometrist was silent, unable even to begin a forced condolence. In fact, he almost panicked, because he felt that for some reason Isaac Penn thought of him as an undertaker.

  “I’m an optometrist,” he blurted out defensively.

  “I know,” answered Isaac Penn. “Don’t worry, I have some work for you. I want you to make a pair of spectacles for my daughter. That is she,” he said, pointing to the sound of the music, “playing the piano. She’ll be finished soon—half an hour, maybe an hour. It’s nice, isn’t it. Mozart.”

  The optometrist thought of his horse standing hitched to the wagon, in the snow. He thought of his dinner gone cold. He thought of his shattered dignity (he was, after all, a professional man), and he said, “Don’t you think, Mr. Penn, that we should inform her that I have come to make her some spectacles? Wouldn’t it be wise?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Isaac Penn. “What’s the point of interruptions? Let her play. When she’s finished, you’ll fashion her a pair of glasses. Do you have your stuff? I hope you do. She needs them tonight. This morning her brother sat on her spectacles, and they were the only pair she had. She has long eyelashes, unprecedented eyelashes. They bat the insides of her lenses. I think it’s uncomfortable for her. Can you put the lenses far enough away so that she won’t bat the glass with her lashes?” The optometrist nodded. “Good,” said Isaac Penn, and leaned back to listen to the smooth tumult of the sonata. She was a superb pianist, almost flawless, at least as far as her father was concerned.

  As the music continued, the optometrist set up his instruments and eye charts. Then he sat down and listened, barely breathing, wondering why such a man as Isaac Penn was so indulgent with his daughter. Actually, for reasons that he did not understand, the optometrist was afraid of her. His palms sweated. He began to dread the moment when she would finish and enter the room, royal princess that she was, to confront a simple grinder of lenses.

  The front door burst open. Two adolescent boys pounded up the stairs and were gone sooner than the glass in the windows could stop vibrating from their entrance. Isaac Penn acknowledged this with a brief smile, and walked over to a corner desk upon which were many fresh Suns. Clattering noises and the smell of roasting chickens came from a nearby kitchen. A dozen fires burned, and the sweet winter woods scented the house with resin and cherry. The piano played. Darkness grew stronger. Finally, night and evening were solidly entrenched outside the house and inside wherever bright lamplight fought deep shadow.

  When the piano stopped, the optometrist swallowed. He heard the cover close over the keyboard. And then a young woman appeared in the doorway, apparently blushing, with cheerful eyes that stared in the direction of the ice-clad windows. She breathed as if she had a fever, and the expression on her lovely face suggested a pleasant delirium. Her golden hair was lit so brilliantly in a crosslight that it appeared to be burning like the sun. She gripped the doorpost with her hands one on top of another, for steadiness and to indicate that she did not wish to interrupt the two men in the reception parlor. Though she was outwardly deferential, it was easy to see that she had no need to defer to anyone. The optometrist thought that her dress was too fetching and sensual for a girl who was hardly a woman, who was a daughter in a parlor, a piano player, a girl with fever standing in the presence of her father. The lace, without which the dress would have been scandalous, breathed rapidly up and down above her chest. It was hypnotic, too fast, unsettling. She had steady blue eyes, but she was so tired from playing the piano that she trembled, and held the doorpost now to try to stop herself from shaking.

  Courtly and quick, Isaac Penn escorted her to a chair. “Beverly,” he said, “this man has come to make you some new glasses.”

  OUTSIDE, THE wind picked up in a sudden clear gale that had come unflinchingly from the north, descending quite easily from the pole, because all the ground between it and New York was white and windblown. On nights of arch cold and blazing stars, when the moon was in league with the snow, Beverly sometimes wondered why white bears did not arrive on the river ice, prowling silently in the silver light. The trees bent despite their winter stiffness, and some, in desperation, knocked and scratched against the windows. If a channel had been kept open in the frozen Hudson, any little bravely lighted boats would now be flying south, nearly airborne with sudden winter speed. Beverly had thought how strange and wonderful it would be if the earth were hurled far from its orbit, i
nto the cold extremes of black space where the sun was a faint cool disc, not even a quarter-moon, and night was everlasting. Imagine the industry, she thought, as every tree, every piece of coal, and every scrap of wood were burned for heat and light. Though the sea would freeze, men would go out in the darkness and pierce its glassy ice to find the stilled fish. But finally all the animals would be eaten and their hides and wool stitched and woven, all the coal would be burned, and not a tree would be left standing. Silence would rule the earth, for the wind would stop and the sea would be heavy glass. People would die quietly, buried in their furs and down.

  “Your horse,” she said to the optometrist, “will freeze to death if you leave him outside.”

  “Yes, I’m glad you reminded me. I must do something about that.”

  “We have a stable,” Beverly said rather coolly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you came in your own rig,” scolded Isaac Penn, leaving to bring the horse into the stable. Beverly and the optometrist were alone.