by Mark Helprin
“Theodore would know what to do. We will, too. After all, we have until March.”
Then they made dinner by slicing off a chunk of smoked beef, spilling upon the table half a pound of dried corn, and grating some hard cheese into a small pile of dairy sawdust. A purée of these three things went to feed the baby. The rest became a kind of landlocked bouillabaisse into which dill brought its springlike scent and red pepper was shaken until the dish that they cooked had enough life to attack them as they devoured it. The sting was satisfying, but the two women were left hungry. What will we do in March? they wondered.
That night, perhaps because it was already the fifth night that they had gone to bed hungry, the answer came to Virginia in a dream that was served up as richly and elegantly as hotel food that lives deep inside booming silver domes and rides from place to place on noiseless carts.
She dreamed of spring in a great city of fuming gray squares and whited sepulchers, of bending willows, and rivers that turned up their spring bellies in wind-flaked sapphire, a city that coiled around its own churches and squares in a weave of streets like a basket of nested snakes, a city of smooth silk hats and cool gray coats, of silent music played on flashing cloud light, of delirious green trees, of stores that led to secret tunnels, of clear days, and crystal palaces, and endless portraits ever arising. This city became alive, and was her lover. She took it without inhibition, grappling with it breathlessly and nude. She sweated, rolled her closed eyes, and sawed back and forth from thigh to thigh, as it overwhelmed her with its surging colors.
The dream taught her that cities are not unlike huge animals which eat, sleep, work, and love. It taught her what it was like for something as massy and giant as a whale to make love unbraced in the gravityless blue ocean. And it taught her that her future (she had always known that her future was in her, waiting to be shaken out) was in the city, and that she would spend her life in the place that she had seen in the dream.
When she awakened she was still half dreaming and still wet from her extraordinary labor, but she calculated immediately that, if she were to go away with the baby, Mrs. Gamely would have more than enough upon which to survive, and might even help someone else.
Mrs. Gamely’s initial opposition was silenced by the beauties and accuracies of the recounted dream. “Though I haven’t ever been there,” Virginia said, “I seem to have known it all well enough to have created it.” To Virginia’s surprise, Mrs. Gamely did not bring up the misfire with Boissy d’Anglas. Instead, she grew as excited as a follower of a lost cause who sees in her old age the possibility that the cause may revive and succeed.
They embraced a thousand times before Virginia left, and it made them cry each time. The last thing Mrs. Gamely said to her daughter was, “Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. Rise, Virginia. Rise and see the whole world.”
Virginia did not know exactly what her mother had meant.
THE LAKE was covered with snow by the time Virginia and her baby rode along its length in a huge troika pulled by horses heavy enough to shake even the thick ice of the Lake of the Coheeries as they pounded down the snow road. By afternoon, they were in the mountains, ascending steadily, turning on hairpin terraces from which they could see a world of white and blue. Now and then a snowy hawk rose from the background camouflage of glistening bone-white fields, and navigated the ocean of air, slipping sideways on the wing more gracefully than a skater.
As they neared the top of the range, they watched the effects of high winds upon the accumulated drifts. Powerful continental gusts burst upon cornices and sculptured ridges, sending up vertical jets of loosed snow. Behind these white silk curtains were glowing rims of gold where the sun shone through their crests. There was so much screaming and whistling that the bells of the troika could hardly be heard. The sleigh driver halted on a round cakelike knob, the summit. Resting there, they saw a landscape of ice and snow crossed and covered by hills and ridges from which white powder rocketed into the air. The horses dipped their heads and shook their ice-encrusted manes. “From here on,” said the sleigh driver, shouting with difficulty through his muffler and the blasts of mountain air, “you can’t see the lake, but only the east and, soon, the Hudson. Take one last look, for we are now on our way to a different place.”
The road led not through fields and past overlooks, but deeper and deeper within an untouched forest, between rock cliffs a thousand feet high, near ice-covered gorges where falls and flumes pounded like jackhammers and covered hundred-foot oaks in freezing spray. They glided over dimly lit roads, springing upon shocked families of deer that had an air of offended innocence, and which they sent white-tailed into the forest, carrying their solid six-foot horns like little battleaxes with which they smashed down waxy bushes bloody with red berries. They drove through vaulted mahogany-colored courses made by trees and snow, and the horses leapt ahead, swallowing the space in front of them and effortlessly compressing the air of the cool snow tunnels. Virginia held her baby to her, inside her coat. His name, for the moment anyway, was Martin d’Anglas, which seemed very apt for a swordsman who swung on ropes, or a legionnaire, and much less apt for a little newt all wrapped up in blue. His mouth and nose stuck out of a navy cashmere balaclava, and he took the cold air like a puppy. Virginia threw back her head to look for hawks and eagles, and was surprised at the many she saw perched in gothic nests high in the trees. They watched, unconcerned, as the troika slipped past. “Look at all those dignified eagles up there,” she said to the driver. “If they didn’t look like they were made of porcelain and gold, I would swear that they were justices of the Supreme Court, in retirement.”
A long gradual slope led to the riverbank, and they came down it just at dusk, to an inn by the Hudson. Pigs huddled together in the yard, singing for the innkeeper to let them into the pig quarters for the night. Muffins of pure white smoke emerged from the chimney. Virginia and Martin (she had already begun to pronounce the name in English) would stay until early morning, when a giant iceboat that could hold half a dozen passengers and their luggage would take them downriver as far as the open channel, where they would get a boat south. In the middle of the night, the innkeeper’s wife—a woman with cheeks redder than the rash that sometimes appeared on Martins two tiny hams—knocked on the door. Virginia switched on the light. She was uncomfortable from a lush and tremendous dinner of lambchops, cornbread, and dandelion salad. The light glared at her, and, in response to its rays, Martin began to punch with his springy little arms and legs. Virginia held her robe closed. “What is it?” she asked.
“Sorry to wake you, dear,” said the innkeeper’s wife with a voice that had lived many years in a crock of mint jelly, “but Mr. Fteley just got a telephone call from Oscawana. The iceboat’s not running, something about the drifts of snow, so you’ll have to skate down there tomorrow, first thing. The cutter will wait until noon. If you leave at eight, you should make it in plenty of time. Mr. Fteley will pull a sled with the luggage.”
“I see,” said Virginia. “How many miles is it from here to Oscawana?”
“Just twenty,” answered Mrs. Fteley, “and the wind will be at your back.”
“Oh,” said Virginia, as Mrs. Fteley disappeared. She turned off the light, and then fell asleep within five seconds. She dreamed of skating, and (as so often happened) the next morning she found herself replicating exactly what she had imagined.
FOR HOURS and hours, she skated nearly in a trance, centered between the mountain banks, on a road of white ice. She was one of those women whose legs seem to come up to everyone else’s shoulders. It would have been impossible to keep her in jail, since, no matter how far across the room the jailer hung his key she would have been able to hook the ring around a toe and bring it to her with one sinuous fold of thigh and calf. So she was a natural speed skater. One long push was good for fifty yards: and she could push for hours. She was only five eleven, but her figure was perfect. Her hair was blue
-black, as glistening as the thick pelt of a healthy seal. She had a perfectly formed white smile that was soft, inviting, and full of power. She was not quite as arresting in photographs as she was in the flesh, for her beauty was sprung directly from her soul, and proved that physical features count little unless they are illumined from within. Nor was she beautiful in a coy sense, either. When she was severe, she looked severe. When she was angry, she looked angry.
With Martin bundled up and riding on her back, she skated downriver, rounding its curling bends and keeping her eyes upon the converging shorelines and ice. She would stop every now and then and put Martin in front of her, kneeling to check on him. He was so well wrapped that he slept as if he were at home in a cradle. Then she would hoist him up and begin again, more and more powerfully. Though the wind was at her back, she was going fast enough so that her hair was pushed from her face.
Behind her at a distance of a mile or so came Mr. Fteley, the innkeeper, pulling a light sled. They traveled silently past sleeping settlements of red brick and slattern wood. At a bend in the river, near Constitution Island, Virginia saw an icehouse in which she decided to rest and escape the wind. Skating at full speed, she turned to stop just before the dock, the silver blades of her skates sending up an abrupt shower of fresh-milled crystals that hung in the air and sparkled. Around the side of the building was an entrance bay for boats and sleds, through which she glided into the dark interior, expelling half a dozen frightened sparrows. It was full of hay and templed blocks of ice in glassy walls that reached up to the roof beams. She was much warmer away from the wind, and she glowed from her exercise. She swung Martin around and unwrapped him. He was awake and smiling, as if he were in on a wonderful joke. Perhaps he was happy because his mother was radiant in the darkness, her cold reddened face central to the scheme of symmetrical light that came through the cracks in the walls. As the blood coursed through her, it brought with it lucidity, equanimity, and a light pounding rhythm that set the baby up and had probably made him smile. While she fed him she listened to her own blood beating, and tilted her head back to stare into the darkness, where the birds lived, beyond the ice blocks.
Long before, in the most severe winter the Coheeries had ever known (until the one they were in) the farmers had cut ice from the Lake of the Coheeries and filled an icehouse on the lakeshore not far from where the Gamelys lived. There was so much of it that it remained, underneath fresh ice cut in subsequent years, for half a century. Then the icehouse was sold to a man who wanted it for a printing shop, and no one put any more ice in it. Soon the old ice was reached, and one summer, when Virginia was six or seven, she was playing near the blocks that had been recently uncovered after half a hundred years. The unrelenting heat that had driven her inside the icehouse was melting these veteran glass bricks and creating little rivers of fresh water. Virginia thought that she was alone. She pressed her palms up against a melting slab full of stilled bubbles, and licked it. Mrs. Gamely had warned her to stay out of the icehouse, because it was full of terrible dangers. “The Donamoula comes into the icehouse at night,” Mrs. Gamely had said, “to chew on blocks of ice and slap his tongue against the salt. If he sees you there,” she told the rapt little girl, “he might think that you are an hors d’oeuvre. Stay out of the icehouse!”
Though afraid of the Donamoula, Virginia had wanted nonetheless to see him, and maybe even to ride him across the lake, like a torpedo. The way Mrs. Gamely described him, it was a safe bet to warrant that even if he did eat little girls, it was only by mistake. Anyway, she moved about with the stiffness peculiar to children who imagine that they are being observed by sea monsters or things that live under the bed at night, and every once in a while she would glance toward the lake door to see if the Donamoula had arrived.
Just when she had completely forgotten the Donamoula, she heard a percussive, wet, sudden, fishy slap. She would not have moved, could not have moved, for all the blueberries in the Adirondacks. Again, the same fishy slap, met this time in the cold mysterious air by yet another, of lower pitch. Dizzy with fear, Virginia moved her head a quarter-turn. No Donamoula. She looked around, convinced that she was about to be encoiled by the swift forty-foot tongue that could catch a cherry pie the way a darter newt catches a bloime bug. No Donamoula, and yet the sounds kept coming—slap slap, quasha, flaship, swipa, spatch!
As her fear subsided she realized that the noise was coming from atop the pyramid of ice. She climbed up, numbing her hands and knees. At the summit, near the hottest space under the eaves, not far from a summer sunray that had broken through a rotted shake and shot down in a tight yellow beam, was a little blue lake of newly melted fifty-year-old ice. Splashing about in this lake were two enormous shad that, years before she was born, had been frozen still, and had now come to life and were smashing their flippant tails in protest and joy. They were silver and gold, and their eyes looked like wise old rainbows.
Virginia remembered the intense unmatchable pleasure of taking the two shad by their twitching scaly tails and carrying them down the pyramid so that she could toss them, in the most beautiful, airborne, moment of their lives, into the lake, where they vanished in the dark water—perhaps to tell their tale to the other fish and refresh the population with the intricate mystery of youth in age, and age in youth. Magic, she knew, was all about time, and could stop it and hold it for the inquisitive eye to look through as if through cold and splendid ice.
She shifted her gaze from the darkness to the white glare flooding through the doorway. For a fraction of a second, Mr. Fteley appeared in the opening, panting along in front of the sled, and then disappeared. Martin was quickly rewrapped. Up he went onto her back, and out she flew from the icehouse, like a racehorse from the start, chasing after Mr. Fteley.
She was in a fine mood when, in a confusion of wind that whipped their scarves in all directions, she caught him. Shouting now over the anarchic wind—they were in a widening bay—she said, “Mr. Fteley, why can’t the iceboat make it upriver? The ice is smooth and thick. I don’t understand.”
“The drift wall,” shouted Fteley.
“The what?”
“The drift wall!” he shouted again. “By pure coincidence, it snowed all in one place just north of Oscawana, and then the wind piled it up in a wall across the ice. It blocks the river completely, as sure as my name is Fteley, from shore to shore as high as the hills on both banks. They can’t tunnel through because they fear it will collapse as it melts.”
“Does it block the whole river?”
“Yes,” he shouted over the wind.
“As high as the surrounding hills?”
“Yes.”
“How high are they?”
“A thousand feet,” he screamed back. “We’ll have to climb it and slide down the other side.”
When they rounded one of the alpine bends that made the Hudson Highlands look like a collection of looming rhinoceros horns, they saw the drift wall—which, unlike Rome, had sprung up in a day, and which had about it the smooth, thoughtless, malicious air of a modern skyscraper. The drift wall was a pile of snow that stretched from mountain to mountain across the solidified river. It was steep, a thousand feet high, and shrouded at the top by a tumbling mist that devoured itself and regenerated, blooming like time-lapsed roses.
“I can’t climb that,” said Mr. Fteley, “not with this luggage, certainly. I thought it was lower, and didn’t know about all that stuff at the top.” His head was bent in awe and fear, his eyes fixed on the long lateral summit. “Christ,” he said, “you may think that I’m a chicken, but I’ve got to consider Mrs. Fteley and my little Felicia. Why don’t you come back upriver and stay with us, free of charge, until the damn thing melts. It’d be a mistake, miss, to try to climb that.”
“Mr. Fteley,” said Virginia, her blood still hot from the skating and her heart still lively from the glory of resurrected colors that she had remembered in the dark icehouse, “I don’t think that you’re a chicken, I understand that
you’ve got to think of Mrs. Fteley and Felicia, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to climb that because of my luggage. So why don’t you go back, and send me my things whenever the iceboat can get through. Meanwhile, Martin and I will go over.”
“But, miss! You’ll disappear in that foam up there. And if you fall back, there’s nothing to clutch on to. You’ll tumble all the way down and die.”
“Mr. Fteley,” said Virginia, her eyes full of lights, “the way I feel now, I could leap that wall in one jump. And if I climb it, as I will, I’ll go in one sure step after another, I won’t be afraid, I won’t fall back, and I will get to the other side.”
“How can you know that? How can you be sure?”
“Simple,” she said, “I’ve seen myself there.”
“You’ve been over already?” he asked, somewhat confused.
“No.”
“You’ve imagined then. That’s different. That’s a cat flying after a bird.”
“No, I haven’t imagined. I’ve seen. That’s no cat flying after a bird.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen? You’ve seen the future?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy!” he said, with an aggressive, nasty lurch. “You can’t see the future. You can’t feel the future. People like you end up in loony bins. It just doesn’t cut.”
“Like hell, Mr. Fteley,” answered Virginia, quite angry that she had been attacked for giving an honest answer. “It cuts. And I’ll get to the other side.” Then she grew even angrier, and turned on him for the way in which he was looking at her. “The world is full of leaden slugs like you, innkeeper, who are afraid of the powers of the heart. You hope that mountain climbers and acrobats fall, that daring bridges collapse, that those who can feel the future be punished. If everyone were like you, Mr. Fteley, we’d still be in hides and skins. Hides and skins. Go back to the inn. Cook up some farina. Put your spittoon on your head. You can send our luggage after the thaw, because Martin and I are going to the city.”
