Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Virginia seemed likely to cry again, so he said, “It’s true. People die. That’s what happens. But think of the children. There’s Jessica, her cousin John, and the Penn children from Boston. You shouldn’t be worrying about these things, little girl.” He brushed her hair from her forehead and kissed her. Then they left that freezing gallery, and Virginia would always remember the colorful spirits, floating about her in the half-light, as if she had known them. But though she remembered their stories, she could not recall their faces.

  Here, in another gallery, underground, was Jessica—like Virginia, a full-blown beauty, though the difference between city and country was profound and apparent.

  They were somewhat taken aback by the way in which they had aged, and, at once, they knew that they could not resume the friendship they had had as young girls. Knowing this, they were restrained, though they could feel a certain new warmth between them, born of the mutual realization that they were not foolishly effusive, and had developed into dignified and intelligent presences unwilling to barter away what they had become, for a short-lived reminiscence that could not have been sustained.

  Martin threw a reflexive punch at his mother’s friend, who then led both of them through the Oyster Bar to a large circular table, where Virginia sat down and was introduced, round robin, to Jessica’s numerous companions.

  It was a journalists’ dinner, and, among journalists, Praeger de Pinto (though quite young) was the most eminent. In addition to being managing editor of both The Sun and The Whale (that is, The New York Evening Sun and The New York Morning Whale), he was engaged to Jessica Penn, and was therefore the leader of the gang—though he would have been anyway. He knew just about everything, and, due to his position, he knew that much more.

  “You look like you’ve had a hard journey,” he said.

  “I have.”

  “Have you come from the north?” he asked, having heard of the refugees occasioned by the amazing snows and stunning cold that had gripped everything above the Hudson Highlands, and seemed to be on the way to the city itself.

  She nodded.

  “The far north?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Not easily,” Virginia answered, and looked down, embarrassed.

  “Let’s get some food into you and the child,” Praeger said. “The maître d’ has a very gentle fish porridge for babies: I’ve seen him prepare it, and I’d eat it myself. And, as for you, may I recommend that you have what we’re having?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have much money.”

  “No no,” Praeger assured her with remarkable good nature and generosity. “This is a Sun monthly management dinner. Everyone eats on The Sun. We’re having some oyster pan roast, grilled haddock filets stuffed with lobster, roasted potatoes, green peas, and Dutch beer. It’s coming all around, and in half a second I can order another place.”

  “Thank you,” said Virginia, delighted at her excellent fortune.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Praeger. “May we introduce ourselves?”

  That was a rhetorical question. They were itching to introduce themselves, especially the single men, except for Courtenay Favat, who stuck his head in the air, like a turtle.

  Jessica said, “I’d like you to meet my friend Virginia Gamely.”

  “From Lake of the Coheeries, New York,” Virginia added in a voice like a bell, after which the managing editor called the roll of his subordinates according to the order in which they ringed the table.

  There was Courtenay Favat, editor of the home and ladies’ page, a holdover from the days in which The Sun’s patrons looked to it for canning and pickling hints, or advice on how to darn and crochet. Courtenay was simultaneously food, wine, fashion, and home editor, and he had half a page or less per day in which to operate. The Sun was devoted to hard news, literature, science, exploration, and art. Its competitor, The New York Ghost (a tabloid founded by the Australian newspaper magnate, Rupert Binkey, and left to his grandson, Craig) had literally thousands of employees doing Courtenay’s job. They even had an editor-in-chief of vegetables, and a dry-cleaning critic. But because Harry Penn was a puritan, a spartan, a stoic, and a trojan, he brooked no full-page banner headlines about truffles or potato puffs.

  Hugh Close, The Sun’s rewrite editor, had the boundless energy of a hound, and was always perched upright, like a Labrador waiting for a stick to be thrown into a cool lake. He had a red mustache, and red hair that was sculpted to his head like clay. He could see puns in everything, and one could not speak to him without suffering an embarrassing disinterment of double entendres. His suits were gray; his shirts had collars with bars; he could read a thousand words a minute upside down and backward (the words, that is, not him); he knew all the Romance languages (including Romanian), Hindi, Chuvash, Japanese, Arabic, Gullah, Turqwatle, and Dutch; he could speak any of these languages in the accent of the other; he generated new words at a mile a minute; he was the world’s foremost grammarian and a master of syntax; and he drove everyone mad. But The Sun was unmatched in style and linguistic precision. Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment. (In fact, he did not like cats, because they could not talk and would not listen.)

  Then there was William Bedford, the financial editor, who lived entirely for Wall Street. Even when he hiccuped, it was said, a stock price jumped out, and he had asked in his will to be mummified in ticker tape. He looked like a British major who had just emerged from the desert, which is to say that he had a long thin face, hair of bronze, gold, and silver, and an expression that was lean, and grave, and slightly alcoholic. Both his father and grandfather had been presidents of the New York Stock Exchange, so he knew everyone and everyone knew him. His column was religion to many, and the organization of The Sun’s financial section was a pleasant miracle of graphs, charts, illustrations, and accurate analysis. Harry Penn always said that he wanted people who were good at what they did, even if they had ragged edges (though Bedford was an obvious smoothie compared to the various saws that headed other departments). “We’re not a college,” Harry Penn once declared. “We’re a newspaper. I want the best people, people who live their trade, experts, fanatics, geniuses. I don’t care if they’re a little peculiar. Close, here, who is sort of peculiar himself, will polish out all the unbecoming oddities, and that will give us a paper which is to the newspaper trade what the Bible is to religion. Understand?”

  To round it out was, appropriately, Marko Chestnut, chief artist for both The Sun and The Whale. All the time that they had been talking, he had been sketching, and he introduced himself by holding up the drawing he had done. No stranger to the powers of art, Virginia immediately knew several things about Marko Chestnut. First, as with the other senior staff of The Sun, he was, in terms of his skill, second to none. Over many years of rapid sketching, the demand upon a newspaper artist for speed and memorization had taught him to extract the real and essential lines of the scene before him. And Virginia was pleased that he was not content, as so many other artists might have been, to do a humorous sketch of the diners. Although she did not know it, restaurants all over the city were filled with partial caricatures that betrayed not the subjects’ distortions, but the artist’s lack of vision. One could, in a few lines, show the soul. One could, if one had the courage. For the world was full of feelings, and there was so much to people that even weak lines of charcoal could enlighten and amaze—not because of what they were, but because of what they showed of the truth.

  In Marko Chestnut’s drawing, virtues and idiosyncrasies became magically evident. Praeger de Pinto was drawn larger than the rest, and, like all people of destiny, had a look of both contentment and agitation. Bedford had shining eyes, a gray suit as pale as ash, and a smile like that of a kind wolf. Next to him perched Close, caught disarmingly in a moment of laughter. Courtenay Favat was pictured as a very small face subsumed in the flor
al bloom of his bow tie. And Jessica Penn, standing, was an unmistakable fusion of womanly beauty and ripening sex. In the drawing of her there was no color, but, rather, a suggestion of ivory where thighs and bosom pressured a rounded outpouring of silk. Marko Chestnut had emphasized Virginia’s springy black hair, her country-straight back, and her delightful smile. Martin was given a lifted eyebrow. His skepticism was directed at Marko Chestnut himself, who was bent over, faceless, rendering the drawing in which he appeared.

  When the introductions were completed, a band struck itself up in a corner under one of the many echoing arches and began to play palm waltzes. Praeger summoned a waitress to ask for two and a half more dinners, for Virginia and Martin, and for his secretary—red-haired, green-eyed Lucia Terrapin, who had come in with some things for him to sign.

  The halibut steaks sizzled, the peas glistened like medieval enamels, the potatoes sang to one another of the pleasures of their roast, and the beer was as good as if it had come from a giant cask in a Lake of the Coheeries tavern. They ate like jackals, and though they tried to discuss business, they were having too much fun. The conversation drifted while, eating ferociously and tapping their toes to the tune of Dewey’s “Olives Omnikia,” they attempted to find out about the long-legged northern beauty, and her baby who sang along with the music in a most unusual, unrestrained, and mysterious cacophony.

  “Is your husband coming down soon?” asked Lucia Terrapin, who was young, and bound to make faux pas.

  “I don’t have a husband,” Virginia answered without the slightest hint of discomfort, “at least not for the present. His father,” she continued, turning briefly to Martin, “was overtaken with a religious fervor so extreme that he had to leave us. That’s all right. We’ve accommodated.”

  Trying to smooth the ripples, Lucia said, “Is he still up there, in Lake of the Fairies?”

  “Fairies?” Virginia repeated, amused. “I’ve never heard it called that before. It’s Lake of the Coheeries, not Fairies.”

  Hugh Close was suddenly excited by the possibility of learning the derivation of a word. “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” answered Virginia. “It’s a proper name.”

  “Yes, but where does it come from? Which is to say . . .”

  “It’s etymologically uncertain,” Virginia declared. “But I have my own theory. You know of course that a ‘heer’ is a measure of linen or woolen yarn containing two cuts, the sixth part of a hesp or hank of yarn, or the twenty-fourth part of a spyndle. Though the origin of the word is obscure, most philologists agree that it’s close to the Old Norse ‘herfe,’ meaning skein,” she said, sparkling. “But don’t be fooled by Old Norse cognates!”

  “Certainly not. I should say,” said Favat.

  “They’re as deceptive as Frisian. When you start fooling around with aural analogies of English and the Teutonics, especially Old High German, you’re bound to make mistakes. The secret for determining the origins of upper New York State place-names lies, I believe, in morphological and orthographical distortions produced by naïve transliterations or imprecise recollections (or, of course, translingual or cross-dialectical phonological adaptation) of place-names in an unfamiliar language. What I think is that Coheeries is the American dialectical form of Grohius, who was one of the first Dutch patroons to settle west of the mountains. In encompassing most of the eastern shore of the lake, his estate may have been thought to include the lake itself. Thus, the Lake of Grohius, transforming slowly over time into the Lake of the Coheeries, just as ‘Krom Moerasje,’ meaning ‘crooked little swamp,’ in Dutch, became ‘Gramercy’ in English; thus your Gramercy Park. But I really don’t know.” She laughed.

  Everyone who heard this, especially Close, was as stunned as a bird dog at an air show. Virginia had no idea that her little dissertation was not the normal stuff of social discourse, for, after all, she had spent her life with Mrs. Gamely, who could spit out thirty paragraphs like that as easily as she could turn a flapjack.

  “Do you have a doctorate in linguistics?” asked Praeger.

  “Me?” Virginia was surprised and embarrassed. “Oh no, Mr. de Pinto. I never went to school for a day in my life. There is no school in Lake of the Coheeries.”

  “There isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “I thought,” said Marko Chestnut, “that every child in New York State had to go to school.”

  “Perhaps,” Virginia explained. “But, you see, Lake of the Coheeries isn’t really in New York State.”

  “It isn’t?” several people asked at once.

  “No,” she said, anticipating difficulty. “It’s not on the map, and mail never gets through unless one of us picks it up in Hudson. It’s hard to explain. You can’t, well, you can’t just go there.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No.” Now she knew she was on thin ice. “You have to be. You have to be . . .”

  “What?”

  “You have to be . . .”

  “A resident,” said Jessica.

  “Yes!” Virginia exclaimed, “a resident.”

  Then, because Jessica brought all her influence to bear, the matter was quietly dropped. No one believed in the cloud wall anymore; no one could see it; no one understood. It was best not to pursue the subject. Anyway, recognizing Virginia’s unusual perspective and apparent intelligence (not to mention her beauty), each department head proceeded to sound her out with an eye to offering her a job. Economic as usual, Bedford asked her, quite simply, what she did.

  “In what circumstance?” she responded, puzzled, for in Lake of the Coheeries no one would ever think to ask such a question.

  “For a living,” he said, unwilling to be put off.

  “Oh, all kinds of things. I help mother cultivate the grapes and corn, and tend the vegetables and the apiary. I cut ice from the lake in winter. I fish. I gather berries, weave, mend, cook, bake, sew, and take care of Martin. Sometimes, I do the calculations for the village accounts, or read to Daythril Moobcot when he has to go down underneath the dynamo to fix it. I work a lot in the library. The town has very few people, but in our library we have more than a million and a half volumes.”

  “That’s it,” Praeger said under his breath, wondering if she could write, and what she might say.

  “And I tutor children and adults when they are in need, for which the village pays me a small cash sum.”

  Even Favat was interested in her now, imagining that she probably had some killer recipes for blueberry muffins and other rural foods (which, in fact, she did).

  “Can you draw?” asked Marko Chestnut, already in love.

  “No,” answered Virginia, modestly looking down. She was uncomfortable now with all this attention: she had not really been aware of it at first. Jessica rescued her. They had had a difficult trip, Jessica said, and it was time for the baby to sleep.

  Before they went to bed in the new Penn house (somewhere, it seemed to Virginia, inside a vast maze of overly prosperous streets), Jessica spoke to Virginia on the landing. “Praeger told me that he would like to see you, tomorrow if possible, at The Sun. He thinks,” she continued, with the air of an official about to award a lottery prize, “that he may want to offer you a job on The Sun or The Whale, or both, as is often the case.”

  “But I don’t know anything about working on a newspaper,” Virginia said.

  “I have a feeling that you could learn. Don’t you think it might be a fine idea?”

  “Yes,” answered Virginia. “If I’m lucky, I’ll dream about it tonight, and tomorrow I’ll know what to do.”

  ON THE afternoon that Virginia went down to Printing House Square to see Praeger de Pinto in the old and beautiful offices of The Sun, the city was ablaze in winter blue. To get there she had to pass through the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and these places full of surging color, that were the match of any Oriental city, pleased her no end. By the time she reached Praeger’s office, strength had come to her f
rom a thousand dissonant sources. She had harvested it from the city, the harbor, the ten thousand ships moving down a net of fast rivers, and the pristine geometry of the colossal bridges.

  Praeger asked her questions for two hours, drinking in her soft eloquence and marveling at the way in which she thought. “Can you write the way you speak?” he asked.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

  Then he sent her into another room to write her first impressions of New York. She returned in an hour with a perfect essay as fresh as an apple. He read it twice, and then again. It was as pleasurable for him as kissing a beautiful woman.

  “I feel,” he said, “as if I’ve seen this city for the first time; and I thank you for it.”

  Virginia had written only what had seemed to her to be the truth of the way things were.

  “Will you write a column for the editorial page? We’ll run it in both papers, twice or three times a week. The system here is unique: it was fashioned after that of a whaling ship. Everyone is paid in shares, and—except for the size of offices and number of assistants—the benefits are equal. As an editorial page columnist, you would be well compensated because you would have a large number of shares.” Then Praeger told her the range of the money, and even the low figure was more than she thought might have come to her in a lifetime, much less a year. The high figure was greater than the gross domestic products of Lake of the Coheeries and Bunting’s Reef (the next town) put together. It scared her, but then she remembered that in traveling through the city for an hour, she had seen enough to write a thousand encyclopedias of deep praise. Surely, she thought, two or three pieces a week would be no problem considering the fact that a day’s walk among the towers, bridges, and squares would send her home with her pen cocked as if it were ready to be launched from a crossbow.

  “I think I’ll take it,” she said. “But I don’t know the city, and I don’t know this kind of work. I fear that if I start too high, I’ll have a distorted view. And, besides, Mother always said that one must be devoted to the thing itself, so I don’t care for quick promotions and too much ease. Let me start from the beginning, with everyone else. I like the race rather than the winning.”