Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “Do you? Really?”

  “Yes. I’ve imagined great victories, and I’ve imagined great races. The races are better.”

  “The pay isn’t the same at the bottom.”

  “Were not materialists. We don’t need much.”

  “The custom here is to give a new employee ten days at salary, during which he can think about what’s going on, and make an honorable and efficient break with whatever he has been doing. I expect you to rise rapidly. I hope that before the year is up, you’ll be writing a column for us.”

  Virginia walked through the spacious galleries of The Sun, past people whose work seemed to mesmerize them, and she skipped out the front doors and nearly floated across Printing House Square. She took half of her ten days’ salary and put it in an envelope that she bought from a man who sold stationery from the inside of his coat. This she would send to her mother. She hadn’t that much left, and she knew that it would be difficult. Still, she took the crowded streets and passed like a newly crowned queen through one after another of the city’s exhausting districts. When she got to the Penns’, she picked up little Martin and danced about.

  This was only a dream. But the next day, upon her awakening, the elements of the dream fell into place exactly. Even the words spoken were the same. She had seen in her sleep the details of rooms in which she had never been, and known weather that had not yet formed, and streets upon which she had never walked. One thing was noticeably different. In Chinatown, on the way home, she bought Martin a big cherry cookie. It was sold to her by a fat Caucasian boy with slit eyes and a Chinese hat. He seemed very strange.

  Now there were practical things to be accomplished. She had to find an apartment, get some new clothes, arrange for someone to take care of Martin while she worked. But these things would be easy. She believed that the city was so full of combinations, permutations, and possibilities that it permitted not only any desire to be fulfilled, but any course to be taken, any reward to be sought, any life to be lived, and any race to be run. She closed her eyes and saw the city burning before her in enticing gold. The sky, filled with great voluminous clouds, was ablaze in winter blue.

  In the Drifts

  THOUGH SAN Francisco is a tranquil city, anesthetized in blue, when Vittorio Marratta died it was as if a clap of thunder had rolled over the hills. Had he not specifically prohibited it, the line of black limousines following his hearse would have been a mile long. He was central to several communities at once, and when such a man dies it seems unnatural, causing even his enemies to pour out their respect. Signor Marratta was the leader of San Francisco’s Italian community; a scientist whose discoveries in astrophysics were weighty enough to occasion the naming of not one but three galaxies after him (Marratta I, II, III) in a far-distant section of the northern sky; the onetime president of the university across the bay, in the days before its troubles shattered the scholarly quiet in which it had been founded; a former captain in the Navy, commander of a capital ship in wartime; and a wealthy fleet owner whose fast container carriers graced the bay with arrivals and departures several times a day from or for Tokyo, Accra, London, Sydney, Riga, Bombay, Capetown, and Athens, and whose tugboats made all the adjustments required for the very same harbor that his ships made busy.

  The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes. They knew that he had come from Italy after the Great War, but not that he had deserted the carnage, spent a year like a thief, and finally swum into the harbor at Genoa to climb up the anchor chains of a ship, which—unbeknownst to him—was headed for San Francisco. They knew that he had married the daughter of a ship owner, but they did not know how much he had loved her before she died, or what it had done to him when she had. They knew that he had fought for the presidency of the university, but not how hard and taxing a fight it had been. They knew that he had discovered galaxies and described some fundamental truths, but they didn’t know by what hand he had been guided, nor that, after many years of deep thought about what he had seen and measured, he had been rewarded by the sight of something that he was unable to reveal only because of the character of the age. And they knew that he had two sons, but they knew little about them.

  When thunder clapped over the city which knows no thunder, all kinds of things happened. Relatives bustled about buying flowers and renting automobiles, only to find that they had been excluded from the procession by order of the deceased—who had wanted just his sons at his graveside, and a priest. Lawyers and accountants were put to work as hard and suddenly as Seabees who must build an airfield in half an hour. Academic buildings were renamed. The observatory flew its flag at half-staff. And everyone wondered how the sons would manage all that would be left to them. Seventy-five large ships, all the tugboats in San Francisco Bay, a department store, several office towers, enough prime real estate upon which to build another city, trusts, subdivisions, and the ownership of large blocks of stock in great corporations, were all at issue in the will. Signor Marratta had come to own a section of the economy as varied and richly colored as a long core sample from the bed of a tropical sea, and his herd of chattels was like the one on Noah’s Ark. Naturally, everyone was curious about the disposition of these assets.

  The will was read on a Wednesday in May, three weeks after the funeral, when the cracks of thunder had begun to fade. In May serenity, students left on sunny empty roads to see other parts of the country, and those who remained were enjoying the strong sun, and the shining clear days that were still wonderfully cool. A hundred people were gathered in the nearly ultraviolet shadows of the largest room in the Marratta house on Presidio Heights. Swaths of deep blue were visible through French doors that led to a long balcony overlooking the bay. Had it not been for the chill of the marble, as white and clean as the cliffs of Yosemite, Signor Marratta himself might have been forgotten, for, with 150 people in attendance, the reading of the will was like a cross between a private school commencement, a court-martial, and the assembly of a covert religious sect. Sitting in the first row were the two sons, Evan and Hardesty. In their early thirties, they seemed younger. And they were strong and restless in a way that suggested that they should have been not in a ballroom but out on a playing field somewhere, or in a forest where the light was dazzling on blue streams.

  “I fear,” said the senior of the five lawyers who directed the proceedings, “that today there will be much disappointment in this room. Signor Marratta was a complicated man, and as is often the case with complicated men, he favored simple actions.

  “During nearly half a century of association with him as friend and legal adviser, I found myself in a lifelong debate about the law. Signor Marratta did not know the law, but he knew its spirit, and as often as not he insisted upon a simple approach that I rejected—only to hear from me (after much labor and research) that, indeed, he was right. I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he knew what the law intended and in what places it would stand fast. I am saying this not to eulogize him or to apply on his behalf for posthumous honorary admission to the bar, but, rather, to caution you against making a quick judgment about what will undoubtedly appear to some as a rash act.

  “Signor Marratta was the richest man I have ever known, and he left the shortest will that I have ever seen. If you expect to sit here for hours, listening to ever larger disbursements, you will be surprised, for he has provided most of everything to only one inheritor, and a small gift to another. I am afraid that many of you will be deservedly embittered.”

  Instead of stirring, the room was tense with silence. Expectation and fear coiled together in a stalemate as symmetrical and interdependent as the struggling snakes of a caduceus. Representatives of universities and charitable institutions, directors of hospitals, long-forgotten relatives, stray acquaintances, obscure employees, and delegates of the press strained together in suspense—all but the very last hoping beyond hope that the rash ac
t of which the lawyer had spoken would make them wealthy beyond their most fanciful dreams.

  Nonetheless, they all thought that Evan would receive the small gift, which would probably be something bitter and ironic in token of his less than exemplary character. His mother’s sudden death had made him a master of calculated greed, dissolute behavior, and indiscriminate cruelty, and he lived only for what he could extract from his father, who loved him despite this.

  He had bloodied Hardesty so often in vicious boyhood attacks that Hardesty was always afraid of him, even in Hardesty’s late twenties after he had fought in two wars and long been a strapping athlete. The years of military service, interrupting his career at graduate school, had made the younger brother diffident and shy. He had been broken more than once in the Army, and was one of those who had come back hurt and disillusioned.

  The witnesses at the reading of the will assumed that everything would go to Hardesty because he was so quiet and nondescript, and they eagerly awaited the final slap that Evan would receive for all the drugs he had taken, cars he had wrecked, women he had made pregnant, and days he had wasted. They saw that even in the short space between the lawyer’s announcement of the peculiar conditions of the will and the undoing of the waxen seal that had protected it, Evan was staring at Hardesty in a way that suggested intimidation, flattery, and murder.

  Evan was sweating and breathing hard. His fists were tight and his eyes wide. Hardesty, on the other hand, sat sadly next to his brother, thinking, undoubtedly, of their father—not because he was pious or dull, but because his father had been his only friend, and now he was horribly lonely. He wanted the proceedings to end; he wanted to return to his rooms, where he had very little except books, plants, and the view. Evan had moved out years before to an aerie on Russian Hill, a cavernous triplex that he used for seducing women who were impressed by the vast amount of electronic equipment he had amassed against several of its walls so that it looked like a blockhouse at Cape Canaveral.

  Hardesty did not even have a bed. He slept on a blue-and-gold Persian rug, wrapped in an old Abercrombie & Fitch rust-colored wool blanket. His pillow, however, was eiderdown, and he always kept a clean case on it. Apart from thousands of books, Hardesty had few material possessions. He didn’t have a car, preferring to walk or take public transportation wherever he had to go. He didn’t have a watch. He had one suit, and it was fifteen years old. And he had one pair of hiking shoes, and they had seen three years of daily use. In contrast to his brother’s closet of eighty shaped suits, half a hundred pairs of Italian shoes, and a thousand ties, hats, canes, and coats, Hardesty’s wardrobe could fit into a small knapsack. Considering his wealth, he lived rather simply.

  His father had known very well that Hardesty was silent and withdrawn because he was recovering from the wars, gathering strength, learning. Signor Marratta had loved Evan the way one loves someone who suffers from a terrible disease—all in sorrow. But he had loved Hardesty out of the deepest respect and sympathy—all in hope and pride.

  It was generally believed that Hardesty would be rewarded for his asceticism and discipline, and that he would emerge as a solid and engaging figure fit to control his father’s wealth and manage it justly. There was much pleasant anticipation of seeing him move from his quiet world into the rush of things, where, it was presumed, his fresh and obviously keen intellect would be not only constructive, but surprising. Of all those present at the reading of the will, only Hardesty did not assume that he was due for an apotheosis in dollars, and only Hardesty sat calmly and free of expectation. The lawyer read.

  “‘Herein the last will and testament of Vittorio Marratta, San Francisco, drawn the first of September, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-five.

  “‘All my worldly possessions, ownerships, receivables, shares, interests, rights, and royalties, shall go to one of my sons. The Marratta salver, which is on the long table in my study, will go to the other. Hardesty will decide, and his decision as it is first announced will be irrevocable. Neither son will be entitled to the patrimony of the other, ever, under any circumstances, the death or desires of one or the other notwithstanding. I make this declaration in sound mind and body, convinced of its justice and ultimate value.’”

  At last, Hardesty was amused. Though he had a sense of humor, it was largely a private attribute. For the first time since his father’s death, he smiled, and in doing so he revealed even further that he had a kind, intelligent, interesting face—unlike that of his grimacing brother. Hardesty shook his head in pleasant incredulity and then began to laugh when he saw Evan begin to quiver in anticipation of having to get a job.

  No way existed for Evan to appeal the decision, and neither could he think of any means by which to befuddle his brother into taking the salver. He had always hated it, even though it was made of gold, because it was engraved with words that he did not understand, and his father had spoken about it in terms far too reverential for a tray worth no more than several thousand dollars. So what if it had been brought from Italy. It was just junk, and he saw it as a pact between his father and Hardesty, a magical link between them that excluded him. The terrible irony was that he would be left with the salver (which he had often ridiculed and once even thrown out the window) and Hardesty would inherit enough to make a thousand men rich. Evan was convinced that he hadn’t a chance, not because Hardesty was interested in the wealth (for he clearly was not) but because Hardesty’s integrity would force him to take responsibility for managing the assets that everyone well knew Evan would mismanage. So the older brother closed his eyes and prepared to face what was for him the equivalent of a firing squad. Perhaps his father had overheard him adding up the Marratta assets (exaggerating what needn’t have been exaggerated), saying the numbers to himself like a monk in a trance. Perhaps his father’s soul, in ascension, had eavesdropped on his first son’s spirit as it was told of the father’s passing, and had been offended by the elated singing. All Evan knew was that Hardesty had the satisfied look of power.

  The assembled political and communal leaders set their eyes upon Hardesty to confirm that what was obviously in his self-interest was also in the general interest, and to urge him to do the expected. Surely, they seemed to be saying, if you renounce the inheritance and it goes to Evan, you will have committed a great evil. Several of them, knowing their own children, grew quite nervous.

  “I recommend,” the lawyer said, “that we adjourn these proceedings until we are notified that Mr. Marratta has reached a firm decision.” He wanted Hardesty’s ear, so as to persuade him to do the right thing. “Is that okay with you, Hardesty?”

  “No,” said Hardesty. “I’ve decided.”

  The tension this engendered was, if not unbearable, at least unpleasant. On the one hand, if he had wanted time to think, it would have meant that he was not sure, and to be unsure of such an obvious choice was a dangerous sign of instability. On the other hand, a firm and quick decision could go either way, and even the right decision would have been taken too quickly. One way or another, it was frightening. If only they could get to him before he opened his mouth, to make sure that he considered these options in context.

  “Such a momentous choice,” began the lawyer.

  “No,” Hardesty said firmly. “You don’t understand. My father had a way of speaking, a way of doing things indirectly so that we could learn while he slowed decisions and held them open to view. When we were young, if we asked him what time it was, he wouldn’t tell us, he’d show us his watch. Everything he did enabled others to learn. He was desirous that we ‘by indirections find directions out.’ And, in this instance, his wishes are very clear to me. Perhaps if I didn’t know him so well—excuse me, if I hadn’t known him so well—I would have a choice. But I have no choice here, not if I am to fulfill his ambitions for me, and, like him, rise out of myself and become something better than what I am.

  “No. I gladly and lovingly submit to his will, and I am sure of what he wanted. The s
alver is mine.”

  A bigger stir could not have been created in San Francisco if the San Andreas fault had finally unseamed itself. Evan could hardly stand the shock. Possession of so much wealth took away his voice for an hour and a half: the sudden infusion of cash alone was like half a pound of cocaine flowing through his veins. Hardesty was forgotten by all, except for the brief moment it took to condemn him. Then, penniless and powerless, he was ignored in favor of his brother, to whom, by necessity, all eyes began to turn.

  The lawyer had wanted to know why Hardesty had done what he had done. But Hardesty refused to tell. The salver had been given to Signor Marratta by his father, Hardesty said, who had received it from his father, who had received it from his father . . . etc., etc., how far back no one knew. But that was not the reason.

  He thought it best to separate himself from the cacophony and gossip that he caused in San Francisco. He was no longer entitled to his room with its wood-railed balcony high above the bay (and would miss it forever), he was unsure of what he would do for a living, and possession of the salver was demanding in itself. He knew that, to satisfy what he understood to be its requirements, he had to leave.

  Knowing that his brother was undoubtedly going to convert and desecrate their father’s study, Hardesty would have to go there and find his way past shields and blockades of memory to claim the great and demanding gift. Then he would leave forever the city of his birth, his home, and the place where his father and mother were buried.

  THE STUDY was the highest room in the house, surmounted by a small old-fashioned observatory in which Signor Marratta had spent many hours in the early days before photon-count narrow-field telescopy. Because they were on the most elevated piece of ground in Presidio Heights, the study on the top floor had a commanding view. As Hardesty climbed the stairs, he remembered what his father had taught him about views.