by Mark Helprin
With that, she turned away from the innkeeper and began climbing. She found that by means of a chain of small steps driven into the dense snow, she soon was high above the ground, like a worker on the face of a dam. Had she fallen backward, she and Martin would have gone through the ice like a cannonball, never to be seen again. But she didn’t look back, the left foot was always forward, she breathed calmly, and she concentrated. In an hour she was nearly at the top, standing vertically in the holds she had dug in the snow, with hands and fingers stuck in as deep as she could push them and spread as wide as she could spread them to get a grip. Sleeping peacefully on her back, Martin was suspended a thousand feet above the ice. Down below, Mr. Fteley was running back and forth like an ant; amazed, afraid, and angry. Virginia slowed just five feet from the ledge that formed the top of the drift wall. Unfortunately, it leaned out. To get over it and into the curtain of mist, she would have to climb while leaning back. How? The snow was hard to hold. She imagined herself and Martin falling, and, as she did, she felt her previously strong hold loosening. Then it occurred to her that she could reverse that effect, and she tried to do so. She imagined herself sticking to the wall, proceeding with surety and grace, losing not a second of her momentum. When she had become agitated with that vision, she made her move, punching holes in the compressible snow while saying to herself, “Go! go!” and she moved up and out. She did hang outward for a few seconds, but her momentum took care of her and thrust her over the edge. Afterward, she thought she heard one long clear blast of a French horn, and realized that it was an illusion of her heart springing free. All Mr. Fteley saw was that she was swallowed up by the mist.
She found herself thrown about by gusts of wind and visible currents of whitened air that rushed at her from all directions. She didn’t actually walk across the ridge, she was waltzed across by the turbulence—which occasionally picked her up and spun her upside down but always put her back again on her feet. In the end it simply spat her out on the other side, having treated her with unusual and uncharacteristic gentleness (all because of the baby on her back, for whom allowances had to be made). Straightening her hair, she walked a few steps through the thinning mist, and then was in the clear again.
There, fifty miles to the south, was the city.
IT WAS another world—shadowy, white, and, above all, silent. The city’s silence, however, was only the solidification of all its countless sounds, fused by mass and distance. Against a background of viscous blue, towers rose like bone. Volumes of unheard sound lifted from among them and floated up, channeled and directed to a place unknown, where it would be received as a dense static, a hissing, a white noise, like surf. The light, too, would compress upon a distant shore. As steadily as a machine, the city signaled its existence in a spectrum of low thunder, with arms outstretched to the future, and memories of what lay ahead pulling it in omnipotent traction.
The air was as clear as that over the Lake of the Coheeries, and yet there were within it distorting lenses that magnified and reduced entire coasts, rivers, and mountain ranges—without explanation and seemingly at will, but always with pleasing effect. Virginia found that she was able to enter the scene before her wherever she wanted, approaching closely to see its every detail. What most attracted her were the ways in which things moved. Seen from afar, they seemed to fit an overall pattern of which they appeared to be (and must have been) ignorant. Ships traveling on the rivers did so with a strong counterpoint forged into their forward motion: it dogged them like magnetism, and could be felt as surely as the ship itself could be seen. The yaw and pitch of these vessels weaved invisible threads, as did the coding of the whitecaps; the passage of clouds; the very busy, mouselike galloping of traffic on distant expressways; and the hemispheric tracking of reflected light in jagged palisades of soaring glass.
Down below, the ice was clean and white, a slab of enamel that did not seem cold. She saw the enormous iceboat pinned at its dock, and a line of people stretched from the loading pier to a big Hamilton-class cutter, stacks smoking lightly, which rested on the ice, frozen in. People were streaming on board to weight the cutter and smash the ice ways upon which it unwillingly lay. It was pointed like a compass needle, its orientation an appeal for the chance to hit blue water and steam through the Tappan Zee toward open ocean. Not even a child could have been more impatient, and, even trapped in the ice, it was so lean and powerful that it looked like a cross between a steam engine and a knife.
As Virginia approached the cutter she noticed that the officers were pacing back and forth, upset that the weight of a thousand extra passengers and their baggage was not enough to break the prison of ice. She walked up a snow ramp to an open door in the hull.
“We’ve taken all the passengers we can, ma’am,” a young officer said to her. “There’s really no more room.”
“But you’ve taken on passengers in the first place to add more weight. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the officer, with an amused smile, “but one more person isn’t going to make much of a difference.” He indicated the great size of the ship, and he didn’t seem to care that Virginia and Martin would be left alone on the ice. In fact, he seemed to derive pleasure from his indifference.
“Two people,” Virginia asserted quite severely, holding up Martin. Martin burped.
“All right,” said the officer. “But you’re the last.”
“I can see that,” Virginia said, looking about the empty ice.
She put Martin on the snowbank, and jumped onto the ship. There was a creak in the ice that made everyone look up. “Just a coincidence,” the officer stated.
Martin began to kick and scream. He didn’t like being the only one not on the ark. “Now, now,” said his mother as she was about to pick him up and take him aboard. The officer had turned away to scold a young boy who was trying to fire a torpedo at Verplanck. As soon as Martin was lifted over the bulkhead and taken inboard, there was a sharp explosive crack and the ship settled into the river, sending up thousands of tons of green water that washed over the ice like a tidal wave and froze by the time it reached shore. The passengers cheered.
Martin was vigorously applauded by all around him. Virginia did not lose the opportunity to address the officer. She cleared her throat and said, “We want to ride on the bridge, and lunch with the captain. We would like a five-ounce filet mignon, watercress salad, a baked potato, tea, a strawberry tart, and some gently warmed milk.”
“And just who the hell are you?” asked the officer, unaware of their role in the recent drama of physics.
Rather than explain, Virginia took Martin aside and fed him herself, and then had the steaming oyster pan roast and hot buttermilk bread that had been offered to the passengers. She had learned her first lesson of the city, and she was unperturbed.
Mrs. Gamely had a small book of paintings by the artists of New York and the Hudson, and when she leafed through its polished pages she felt much the same as some Lake of the Coheeries women felt when they were in church. As she looked at this holy book, she would often say things that Virginia found incomprehensible. Now, because of the ungrateful Coast Guard officer—a man whose gold regalia on a rich navy coat made him look like a painting in motion—Virginia understood, and she speculated that the city would be cold, completely of itself, unconscious, that its every move would be transcendent, and that each of its hundred million flashing scenes would strike a moral lesson.
Such a city would extend vision, intensify pity, telescope emotion, and float the heart the way the sea is gently buoyant with great ships. To do this, it would have to be a cold instrument. And, despite its beauty, it would have to be cruel.
This was deeply bound within the book of images. Only they could explain it. Out of respect and love for her mother, Virginia had learned to regard paintings as something in which time was shattered and light was understood, and to know the steadfast link between high emotions and beautiful images. She knew that the image had to be co
ld, because its task required silence and detachment in the presence of the intangible powers it conveyed, but she had not realized until now why it had to be cruel as well. The cruelty and coldness were almost physical forces. As they acted upon the heart, they made it rise and feel. They purified motives and tested the soul with uncompromising certainty. Images and people had to be strong enough to stand by themselves. For when they did, they had the capacity and power to be interlinked, and to serve.
Virginia stood on deck for as long as she could. The ice-choked river ebbed and flowed from and against the staid sides of the ship, and the wind was like a grindstone of ice. Though he was trim for his age and was not coated with too much blubber, Martin was as warm and flexible as an Eskimo baby, and seemed completely impervious to the cold. In the end, she had to go inside because she was cold. He didn’t mind the warm cabin, and as they sailed down the river he made bicycling motions with his legs and practiced facial gestures.
Virginia peered from the porthole and saw many familiar scenes. On the mountainous banks, trees bent and swayed in the sunny wind. Houses of stone and wood stood on hillsides crossed and bound by miles of neat dry-wall. Great oaks loomed over the river. In Croton Bay, the boys were playing hockey or speeding along the ice with makeshift sails that they had filched from their mothers’ linen closets. The hills of Ossining, and the streets that climbed them, seemed from the river to be sad and forgotten. Ossining was peculiar, and shoddy, too (for it had become poor), but its steep streets, slate roofs, and massive oaks were portraits of beauty and honor.
They passed Tarrytown and the Tappan Zee, where rolling jolly fields were the skirts to craggy thunderous mountains, and orchards came fearlessly to the base of cliffs. Sailing through a gap of pylons in the Tappan Zee bridge, the cutter’s black steelwork came near to colliding with the high roadway but only saluted it with smoke. Half a mile south, the Palisades began, and the city itself came into view. As soon as Virginia saw the gates of the shining city, and the white clouds sweeping over, she knew that she was meant to be there. It did not draw people to it the way it did for nothing. It was God’s crucible, and she was on her way into it.
Down they glided, they glided down, on the fast-flowing river that swept by the town. As they accomplished their nearly silent traverse, the setting sun made the glass palisades and gray towers a shield of gold. And as its light disappeared from all but the tips of spires which glowed like smoldering punks that children used to signal by, the city turned on its cool chemical lamps: a hundred million flashes, fires, altars, and hearths racked on mountainous towers with castled tops—the whole masterpiece bullying Virginia in the insistent and gentle fashion of a good teacher. Next to this enormous harrow of gold and green, of shining ledges and needles, the ships tied up at North River piers looked like insects running along the crack of a baseboard.
“Look, Martin,” Virginia said, holding him so that he could see the whole thing, “. . . the golden city.”
After ten miles of lights and towers, they pulled up at the fire-boat pier on the Battery and the passengers of the cutter were discharged into the night. The officers wanted to speed them into the city so that they could take their ship beyond the Narrows for some real work amid white waves as tall as church steeples, and over a prairie of green troughs. The passengers passed through the wooden halls of the fireboat station and found themselves immediately face to face with teeming streets. Thus the country people were thrown into the city’s gaping mouth.
VIRGINIA AND Martin began to walk aimlessly through the cold. She had neither a plan nor the slightest idea of how to make her way, and by ten o’clock she found herself, exhausted and limp, leaning against a tile arch in Grand Central Station. Streams of people went by without noticing her, because, in her country clothes, she looked like a beggar woman. The several hours of walking in the cold had made her very hungry, and it was a fine coincidence that she was standing just outside the Oyster Bar, where rooms of happy diners deep underground ate frothy oyster stews or sizzling fish steaks while white-jacketed barmen served up clams and oysters on a production line worthy of its finer, more anarchic, deeper-underground predecessors. Virginia pressed against a window and took all this in, but only with her eyes.
Now and then, someone looked up and saw her. This was the heart of the city. In these marble corridors, beggar women roamed by the hundreds. Those who looked up would not look up for long. Virginia was about to turn away and wander, when she saw a young woman on the far side of the dining room rise and peer at her. Then the woman pointed, and asked silently, with gestures that were clear, “Is that you?” Virginia looked behind her, as she often did when people called out, thinking that they had meant someone else. But then the other woman, who was wearing a green silk dress, began to wade through the crowded restaurant.
Waiting for the green silk to duck under and then surface amid the arches, Virginia worried that, because she was tired, she must have looked terrible. But she was wrong. Even though she was slightly winter-frayed by the city, and had walked about too long without a hot drink and some moments of sitting down in a warm room, she still was painfully beautiful. And though cold and tired, she stood straight. When the woman in green emerged from the domes and tiles, Virginia saw a face that she recognized from the Lake of the Coheeries. It was Jessica Penn, a childhood friend from many summers past.
For several generations, the Penns had come to the Lake of the Coheeries each summer (the men for weekends and Augusts, the women and children for an entire season) to watch the light layer itself across the lake, to sit on the porch in world-shaking thunderstorms, to sail for a day and night without coming about once, to anchor in a cove of straight rock walls that no one had ever seen or would see again, to run through blue-green forests suspended in summer’s slow northern time, to come to know the faces, laughter, and eccentricities of those whose fate in life was to die and be half-remembered by children. “Yes,” someone might say, fifty years later, “I think I remember Aunt Marjorie. She was the one who tied bells to the pet bear, showed us tricks with magnets, and baked ginger cookies. Or was that Aunt Helen?”
Virginia heard the sound of her oars as she rowed amid the reeds, a child in full summer. Shuddering like a crazed cymbal, the sun lighted the Lake of the Coheeries until it was as hot and as light-green as the banks of the Nile. Mrs. Gamely, a much younger woman, was calling down from the house, “Virginia . . . Virginia . . . Virginia . . .,” and the call was muted by the heat and distance. “Virginia . . . Virginia,” she called, as the oars dipped in the dark water and Virginia rowed hard to return home. But, though once the oars had been dipped dreamlike into the dark water, the lake had turned to ice with the sadness of the passing years.
One winter, very early on, Theodore Gamely took Virginia with him to inspect the Penn house. Neither water nor ice, the lake was impassable, and to get to the other side they went a long distance by sleigh and on skis, and traveled at times through tunnels in the high drifts. The Penns’ house was an empty ice palace of silent tortured rooms. Oriental rugs, summer furniture, National Geographies, fishing equipment, puzzles, and disconnected lamps huddled in the cold. Snow enveloped the house all the way up to its second-story windows and made it seem like a long-forgotten cave. As her father went from room to room checking for damage, Virginia stayed on the ground floor, trapped by the timeless stares of ancient Penns in many colorful paintings. There they remained all winter, in their old-fashioned finery, still and forgotten, trying to come out of the paintings and embrace one another. When Theodore Gamely came down the stairs, satisfied that all was well, he found that his little daughter, bundled in her furs, was crying—because, she had said, the people in the paintings were dead, and they had to stay alone and apart in this cold room under the snow. But then her father picked her up and took her to each painting, recounting as best he could its history. He showed her old Isaac, whom she had loved very much because of his sad and gentle face, and because he was almost as small as
a child; he showed her Isaac Penn’s wife, Abigail, their sons Jack and Harry, and their daughters Beverly and Willa. “Harry is Jessica’s daddy,” he said. “He’s alive, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Virginia, sniffling, and not quite sure, because she was so young that she hardly remembered seeing Harry Penn a few times the previous summer.
“And here,” said her father, “is Willa. Willa is alive, too. She lives in Boston.”
“Who’s that?” asked Virginia. They stepped forward a few paces in the gloom, and looked up at a high cold wall upon which hung a portrait of a young woman.
“That’s Beverly,” said Theodore Gamely. “I remember her only vaguely. One night, a long time ago, I went on a sleigh ride with Beverly. We went very fast, faster I think than I have ever gone since. We stopped at an inn, where we played Duck Thumb. I was just a little boy: almost as young as you.”
“And who was that?” asked Virginia, pointing to a painting directly opposite the one of Beverly.
“That,” her father answered, “is Peter Lake. He was the man who drove the sleigh. You see how they stare across the room? They loved one another, but she died when she was young—I remember the summer when they came to the lake without her—and he disappeared forever.”
