Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  She had no desire to intimidate him, and was unhappy that he was afraid of her. “Come, measure my eyes,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “I’ll wait until your father returns.” The optometrist was reluctant to be near her. It was not that he feared her illness but rather that he thought it improper to come close to the young woman while she was burning with fever, to feel the heat from her bare arms and neck, to feel her breath, to smell the sweetness that would undoubtedly arise, fever-stirred, from her lace and linen.

  “It’s all right,” she said, closing her eyes momentarily. “You can start now. If you think it improper, then I don’t know what to tell you. But do what you came to do.”

  Since all his instruments were set up, he began immediately, breathing through his nose when he was close to her, as tense and silent as a hunted insect. She, on the other hand, breathed through her mouth, rapidly, because of the fever. Her breath was sweet. He moved laboriously and carefully as he manipulated ivory rules, ebony flags, and lenses in a case, lined up by the dozen, waiting for their great moment—which was to be flipped back and forth while he intoned his chant, “Better this way, or this way. This way, or this way. This way, or this way.”

  How many thousands of times in a day, she thought, does he say, “this way, or this way.” They are his words. He owns them. They must make him dizzy.

  He thought she was beautiful. She was. Though she looked like a fully grown woman and carried herself like one, she had all the great and obvious attributes of youth. He desired, feared, and envied her. She was perfectly formed, rich, and young. And because he had to struggle for his living despite his many physical imperfections, she seemed to him to be gifted and blessed beyond measure, despite the fact that he knew that she had consumption and was full of the wisdom of those who are slowly dying. The fever and the delirium made for a relentless elevation. Opium could have done no better. Long bouts of fever, over months and years, were a dignified way to die, if only because death would have to take so much time to wrestle her down.

  The room was full of motion that spread from her in a dancing half-circle. The fire leapt and bent, running in place like a frantic wheel, the windows rattled as the house breathed, and the trees scratched the glass now and then like dogs who scratch at doors. Beverly could see winter as it ran about the room on the light, darting from the white lances, rays, and silver crosses in the optical glass, to the fire, to the reflective windows, to the blue sphere of her own eye. The room, as she saw it, was a web of motion, a symphony of mischievous dancing particles quite like the smooth and placid notes of a fine concerto. If she could see all this while a nervous man flipped his lenses in examining her eyes, what would she see when the fever grew too great to bear? It didn’t matter. Now there were only inexplicable shards of busy light seeking her out as if they were courtiers.

  “The horse is in the stable,” announced Isaac Penn as he returned. “Is there anything you want from your wagon? I can have it brought . . .”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Penn,” said the optometrist. “This way, or this way. This way, or this way. This way, or this way.” He sat back, relieved and disappointed, and declared that Beverly had perfect vision. She did not need spectacles at all.

  “She’s worn glasses since she was a little girl,” said Isaac Penn.

  “What can I tell you? She doesn’t need them now.”

  “Good. Send me the bill.”

  “For what? I made no spectacles.”

  “For coming here on such a night.”

  “I don’t know what to charge.”

  “She can see well, can’t she?”

  “She can see perfectly.”

  “Then charge me for one pair of perfect spectacles.”

  When a dinner bell rang, everyone in the house began to assemble in the dining room, and, half bowing, the optometrist backed out the door, into the cold December night.

  Dinner at the Penns was unusual in that they and their servants sat at the same table. Isaac Penn was no aristocrat. Having grown up, at first, on the wrong end of a whaling ship, he did not like the idea of separate messes for officers and men. And then, the Penn children (Beverly, before she grew up and got sick, Harry, Jack, and Willa, who was a child of three) were encouraged to bring their friends. “This is our society,” stated Isaac. “Otherwise, we work. But here, all are equal, all are welcome, and all must wash their hands before eating.”

  So, that evening as the cold wind ripped up scrub in the park, as the stars ground into the sky their famous and inevitable tracks, and as a player piano in an adjoining room played popular waltzes, much to Beverly’s chagrin (she liked popular waltzes, but was jealous of player pianos), the Penns (meaning Isaac, Beverly, Harry, Jack, and Willa), the Penns’ friends (meaning blond Bridgett Lavelle, Jamie Absonord, and Chester Satin), and the Penns’ servants (meaning Jayga, Jim, Leonora, Denura, and Lionel), gathered in the big dining room to eat. A fire burned in each of two fireplaces at either end of an informal table set with glimmering china and crystal and laden with an array of symmetrical chickens roasted and trussed, bowls of fresh salad, tureens of Nantucket potatoes in broth, and accessories such as condiments, seltzer, hardtack, and wine.

  Chester Satin had slicked-down hair. He and Harry Penn were scared and guilty, and they looked it. They had skipped school that afternoon, gone downtown, and paid to see Caradelba dancing semi-nude like a Spanish Gypsy. And since Chester Satin had always been bold in a wicked way, he had purchased a stack of pornographic postcards. These now resided under a floorboard in Harry Penn’s room, right above the dining room. Both Harry Penn and Chester Satin felt that the pictures were sure to come sizzling through the plaster and shame them forever. And they could not take their minds off the stack of lascivious women photographed in various states of undress. Their bustles and hoops were jauntily dropped, and you could see their legs below the knee, arms below the elbow, faces, necks, and (in one instance) “bosoms.” These dishonored women had gone far beyond what decency allowed, and though clad in enough underwear to keep a polar explorer sweating at ninety below, they were ready to mortify the two boys simply by falling through the ceiling and floating into Isaac Penn’s hands. Thus, throughout dinner, Harry and Chester behaved like condemned criminals.

  Jack did his homework (it was allowed; any child could read at table), blond Bridgett Lavelle stared at Jack (who wanted to be an engineer), Jamie Absonord stuffed herself with chicken as though her assignment was to eat all the chickens in the world, and Beverly ate like a bear. She was slim, but she burned up all her food faster than the fireplaces swallowed up logs. The other children were growing, and had spent the day in the cold. With amazing speed, the chickens became white snowy bones, the potatoes vanished forever, and the wine disappeared from its bottles as if a magician were at the table. Then the fruit fled from around its pits, and the cakes rapidly became invisible. All the while, the player piano sped through light waltzes. During one of them the roll got stuck and Beverly got up to fix it. When she returned she found Isaac Penn staring sternly at a handful of pictures. The two boys were bent over the table, groaning, and there was a big hole in the ceiling.

  “Lovely women,” said Isaac Penn to Beverly, “but not a one holds a candle to your mother.”

  Before Beverly went to bed that night, she undressed and stared at herself in a full-length mirror. She was more beautiful than any of the women in Harry’s photographs, far more beautiful. She wished that she could go dancing at Mouquin’s and glide about the floor, using her beautiful body to its greatest effect, flowing with the music. She wished that a man would undress her and embrace her. The music circled about in her head as she took deepening swirls upon an imagined marble floor, and for lack of a man she embraced herself. Then she began to dress for bed: a far more practical matter, for Beverly Penn slept upon a platform on the roof, and it was unforgivingly cold up there. But despite the cold and perhaps because of it, the sights she saw were what other people would have called
dreams, desires, miracles.

  TO BEVERLY, fires and tight rooms were like a death sentence. If the open air were not blowing past her face she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. Her regimen, inclination, and promised salvation were one and the same—to stay outdoors, and this she did for all but three or four hours a day, hours in which she bathed, played the piano, and ate with the family. At all other times she could be found in her tent upon a special platform that Isaac Penn had commissioned to be built astride the peaks of the roof. Here she slept. Here she spent the day reading, or just watching the city, the clouds, birds, boats upon the river, and the wagons and cars on the streets below.

  In winter she spent most of her time alone, for few people could sit very long in the bitter cold while the north wind came awash over them like a fall of icy water. Beverly was not only used to it but could not live without it. Her face and hands were usually sunburned, even in January. And despite her frailty and sickness she was as much inured to rough weather as a Grand Banks fisherman, a point of irony apparent when healthy visitors became insensate blocks of ice while she carried on as if she were in a blooming garden late in spring. The visitors were not as seasoned as she. Nor had they the elaborate exquisitely tailored wraps, coats, and hoods, not to mention the gloves, quilts, and sleeping sacks that she had, all of wool, down, or soft black sable. She had an Eskimo parka of down-lined sable that was probably the best piece of winter clothing in the world. It was light and comfortable, flexible, dry, and perfectly warm at all times. The fur hood drawn about her face was like a black sun. Her teeth were so white in contrast that when she broke into a sudden smile it was not unlike turning on a light.

  Winter and summer, she climbed several flights, resting at each landing, until she came to a special staircase leading to a small door. From this door, a catwalk of steel and wood led to her platform, a deck on a steel truss that spanned two roof ridges. The platform was twenty by twelve, and upon it a little tent was anchored more securely than a circus trapeze, and with at least as many wires: the virtuoso rigger who had tied it down had engineered a catenary between pole and pole so the wind could pass over naturally. Three deck chairs faced in three directions to afford varied views, different positions in the wind, and constant attention from a weak winter sun. She had hinged windbreaks of heavy glass, mounted in an ingenious system of pulleys and tracks. She could raise the glass on all four sides up to five feet high. And she had a row of weatherproof cabinets. In the first were enough blankets, pillows, and wraps to have kept Napoleon’s army warm in Russia. In the second was space for about thirty books, a stack of magazines, a pair of binoculars, a lap desk, and some games (Willa was allowed to come in the warmest part of the day to play checkers or war). In the third was a rack of vacuum bottles and canisters in which she could keep hot drinks and whatever food might strike her fancy. The fourth held a weather station. She was an expert at predicting the weather and hardly needed the barometer, thermometer, and wind gauges, but they were useful because she kept carefully penned records—as well as a running commentary on the birds and their behavior, the flowering of the trees, fires in the city (their bearing and duration; the height, density, and color of the smoke; etc., etc.), the passage of balloons and the appearance of kites, the way the sky looked and the kind of boats that went up and down the Hudson. Every now and then a great old schooner would pass, as silent as it was tall, and often the city was so busy that she was the only one to notice it.

  At night as she lay on her bed in the open, or in the tent with some of the canvas rolled back so that she could see the sky, she watched the stars, not for ten minutes or a quarter-hour as most people did, but for hour after hour after hour. Even astronomers did not take in the sky with such devotion, for they were constantly occupied with charting, measurements, the fallibilities of their earthbound instruments, and concentration upon one or another celestial problem. Beverly had the whole of it; she could see it all; and, unlike shepherds or drovers, and the rough and privileged woodsmen who work and sleep outdoors, she was not often tired. The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers. She felt that she looked out, not up, into the spacious universe, she knew the names of every bright star and all the constellations, and (although she could not see them) she was familiar with the vast billowing nebulae in which one filament of a wild and shaken mane carried in its trail a hundred million worlds. In a delirium of comets, suns, and pulsating stars, she let her eyes fill with the humming, crackling, hissing light of the galaxy’s edge, a perpetual twilight, a gray dawn in one of heaven’s many galleries.

  With her face open to the bitter cold of the clear sky, she could track across the Milky Way, ticking off stars and constellations like a child naming the states. She hesitated only when a column of wavy air came streaming from a nearby chimney and shuffled the heavenly artifacts. Otherwise, she said their names in an almost hypnotic chant, as if she were calling to the high stars in the shifting black air of the December sky. “Columba, Lepus, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Orion, Taurus, Aldebaran, Gemini, Pollux, Castor, Auriga, Capella, the Pleiades, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Polaris, Draco, Cepheus, Vega, the Northern Cross, Cygnus, Deneb, Delphinus, Andromeda, Triangulum, Aries, Cetus, Pisces, Aquarius, Pegasus, Fomalhaut.” Her eye returned to Rigel and Betelgeuse, and then slipped back and forth from Rigel to Aldebaran, and to the Pleiades. In the smallest part of a second, she traveled from one to another, spanning light-years. Velocity and time, it seemed, were a matter of perspective.

  She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be. Why was it that in planetarium lectures the telescopic photographs flashed upon the interior of the dome were so familiar—not just to her, but to everyone. Farmers and children, and, once, Paumanuk Indians pausing in their sad race to extinction, had all understood the sharp abstract images, immediately and from the heart. The nebulae, the sweep of galaxies, the centrifugal clusters—nothing more, really, than projected electric light on a plaster ceiling—carried them away in a trance, and the planetarium lecturer need not have said a word. And why was it that certain sounds, frequencies, and repetitious rhythmic patterns suggested stars, floating galaxies, and even the colorful opaque planets orbiting in subdued ellipses? Why were certain pieces of music (pre-Galilean, post-Galilean, it did not matter) harmonically and rhythmically linked to the stars and suggestive of the parallel light that rained upon the earth in illusory radiants bursting apart?

  She had no explanation for these or a hundred other questions about the same matters. Since she had had to leave school, and had learned little of science when she had been there (girls did not take physics or chemistry), she was amazed to awaken one morning and find in her notebook long equations penned in her own hand. She thought that perhaps Harry was playing tricks. But the handwriting, without question, was her own. The notations went on for pages.

  She took them to the planetarium lecturer, who didn’t know what they were. She watched him for an hour as he sat in a pale flood of northern light that came in his window, bent over a roll-top desk, copying. He said that though he could make no sense whatsoever out of any of them, he found them intriguing. In his handwriting, they looked more authoritative.

  “What do they mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “But they look sensible. I’m going to keep them, if you don’t object. Where did you get them?”

  “I told you,” she said.

  “But really.”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at her. Who was she, this lovely blushing girl dressed in silk and sable. “What do they mean to you?” he asked, leaning back into the portable thicket of his gray vested suit.

  Beverly took back her pages and studied them. After a while, she looked up. “They mean to me that the universe . . . growls, and sings. No, shouts.”

  The learned astronomer was shocked. In dealing with the p
ublic he was often confronted by lunatics and visionaries, some of whose theories were elegant, some absurd, and some, perhaps, right on the mark. But those were usually old bearded men who lived in lofts crowded with books and tools, eccentrics who walked around the city, pushing carts full of their belongings, madmen from state institutions that could not hold them. There was always something arresting and true about their thoughts, as if their lunacy were as much a gift as an affliction, though the heavy weight of the truth they sensed so strongly had clouded their reason, and all the wonder in what they said was shattered and disguised.

  He would have been more comfortable had he been speaking with a disabled veteran of the Civil War, or a recluse inventor from some archaic Hudson River town: those were the people that normally came in with sheets of equations. That she was a pretty young girl still in her teens, privileged and well cared for, contrasted so sharply with her obsession that he was deeply saddened and even somewhat frightened.

  “Growls?” he asked, gently.

  “Yes.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Like a dog, but low, low. And then it shouts, mixed voices, tones, a white and silver sound.”

  The astronomer’s eyes were already wide, but she made his heart thud when she said, “The light is silent, but then it clashes like cymbals, and arches out like a fountain, to travel and yet be still. It crosses space, without moving, on a fixed beam, as cleanly and silently as a pillar of ruby or diamond.”

  On the roof, she turned her eye again to Rigel, and then to Orion. The Pleiades were, as always, perfectly balanced in confounding asymmetry. Aldebaran winked. “You’re flashing tonight,” she said into the wind, and Aldebaran burst into a sparkling dance, deaf and dumb, but pleasing nonetheless to her heart. Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion, too, spoke to her. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark and hidden rooftops.