by Mark Helprin
When skis were stacked near the doorways, families reunited, and groups formed, they went inside to eat and rest. Having been without food for days, many were starry-eyed and entranced. They thought they were in a dream world. How pleasant it was. If they had frozen to death on the train, and this was death, then how lovely, and how much better than any life they had known, for it was something that seemed to be flooded with light, and in it all emotions had an inexplicable buoyancy.
“No,” they were told. “You’re not dead. Far from it.”
But they didn’t know whether to believe these good people, and when they went inside they yearned to be out again under the stars, in the cold that seemed no longer capable of hurting them.
HARDESTY AND four others were escorted through the snow tunnel to Mrs. Gamely’s. When he, a cuckoo-clock repairman from Milwaukee, a young Marine, and a married pair of Bengali tourists strained their eyes and peered into the firelit interior of Mrs. Gamely’s cottage, they saw Mrs. Gamely standing by the stove, with Jack held in her arms in front of her. The way she looked (with her too-close-together eyes, and an expression of humility and mischief perfectly combined), she might have been a great snowy owl surprised in its nest. She stepped forward and bowed neatly to each of her guests—as shyly as a little girl in patent-leather shoes at her first dance in some echoing gymnasium. They reciprocated. They sensed something about Lake of the Coheeries, but didn’t know what it was. So they were very cautious, and returned her bows as deferentially as explorers straining to emulate a custom of the bushmen. It occurred to Mrs. Gamely to seize upon this unusual willingness to oblige her, and she repeated the greetings. They followed suit. When she went down the line yet again, bowing gracefully each time, they had to respond in the same way. This went on for at least five minutes, until Mrs. Gamely (as bemused as she could be) noticed that one of her guests was missing.
Looking about, she saw a handsome young man sitting at the table, filling one of the new clay pipes. As he watched the bowing, he grew more and more delighted at Mrs. Gamely’s sense of play. From that moment on, he understood her.
One might think that the sudden arrival of five unknown guests would prompt a flood of talk from an old woman who had been alone for more than a year, especially if she, like Mrs. Gamely, had a vocabulary of six hundred thousand words. But she had many hours each day in which to talk to Jack and to herself, and since she was the only one in the world who could understand exactly what she was saying without raping the dictionary as she spoke, she seldom unleashed her full range of words on passersby. Instead, she devoured their speech, milking them like cows for the secrets of their dialects and regional usages. She put five new words in her store from the cuckoo-clock repairman alone—escambulint, tintinex, walatonian, smerchoo, and fuck-head (all of which, save the last, were Milwaukee terms referring to the various parts of cuckoo clocks). The Bengalis were a gold mine. Their English, like waving silks and birdsong, so entranced Mrs. Gamely that she pushed them on and on until they nearly collapsed because they could hardly get anything to eat.
“What do you call that, in your country?” Mrs. Gamely would ask, pointing, for example, to a steaming loaf of Coheeries bread.
“Bread,” answered the husband.
“Must be variants,” Mrs. Gamely insisted.
“Well, yes,” they chirped together, and the husband went on. “When a little fellow wants bread, he says, ‘Ta mi balabap.”’
“Balabap?”
“Yes. Balabap.”
“And what do you call a policeman who takes bribes?”
“A jelby.”
“And a broken weir upon which swans nest?”
“A swatchit-hock.”
So it went as she fed them milky-white Coheeries bread, venison stew, roasted Canadian bacon, and a tureen of mixed vegetables in venison broth. She apologized profusely for not having any salad. The worst thing about winter was that there was no salad, and try as they did the local people could not find a way to preserve it—by freezing or otherwise. For dessert, she had baked a batch of blueberry-walnut-chocolate cookies with cherry-brandy centers. But because there were six for dinner, she had used up all of her platters, and had nothing upon which to serve the cookies. Alert to the importance of such things to women of advancing age, Hardesty reached into his pack and pulled out the salver.
Either because it had been polished as it had moved around in the pack, or because it was somehow changing, it seemed more dazzling than it had ever been. When he held it for them to see, they took in their breaths, for it caught the flamelight and the yellow glow of the kerosene lantern like a mythical shield, and its rays struck out in all directions, as busy and alive as the lightscape of a great city. What entranced them most was not the glimmering gold, but that here was a still thing which moved. It was molten, calculating, changing in front of their eyes.
“That is a beautiful plate,” said the Bengali woman.
“Too beautiful just for cookies,” Mrs. Gamely added. “I couldn’t use a salver like that for serving cookies.”
“Why not?” asked Hardesty. “It’s not delicate. Hardly that. My brother threw it out of a seven-story window onto concrete and it wasn’t even scratched. It’s pure gold. It won’t stain or tarnish. I wouldn’t mind if you used it for serving up roast beef. Something like this, which is of the highest order, can do even the humblest tasks. That’s true about words, isn’t it, Mrs. Gamely? They serve peasants as well as kings.”
He tossed it upon the table, where it rang for two minutes as it settled down like a spinning golden sovereign, and warmed everyone’s face as if it were a coal fire.
Mrs. Gamely went to the oven and got out the cookies. As she placed them around the salver, Hardesty read and translated the virtues. When Mrs. Gamely began to lay the cookies across the plate, Hardesty read the inscription in the center.
“Does it really say that?” she asked. “‘For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone’?”
“Yes,” Hardesty answered.
“I see.” She covered the inscription with a line of cookies, and did not mention it again.
That night, as she lay in her bed upstairs, thinking about her charges sprawled on mats and blankets in the main room the way Virginia’s friends had done in the past at their pillow parties, she wondered about things she had heard as a little girl, about certain beauties that she had once been promised would arise. And with tremendous excitement and fear, she thought that these promises might come true in her lifetime, after all. She had long given up on them for herself, and hoped only that Virginia or Martin would see them. She had once believed in miracles, shining cities, and a golden age. She had learned, however, soon enough, that such things were only illusions. But now she wasn’t quite sure. A great massy wheel seemed once again to be turning. Or was it a vain and foolish misinterpretation of her past? Probably. But, no. No. The lake had frozen. And the start of the third millennium was drawing near. Perhaps it was not an illusion, for the lake had frozen early and as black as a mirror only one other time.
It was when she was a child, and the Penns had come from the city to bury Beverly Penn on their island. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the cold night not long after the Penns had returned to New York, when she had been awakened by the pull of the stars, which hissed and crackled like an icy waterfall, and were dancing all over the sky, brighter than she had ever seen them. She was only four or five, and had to stand on tiptoe to see out the window. It was then, as she looked over the lake, that she had learned the true meaning of the word “arise.”
THE DAY that Hardesty arrived in New York was cold and dry. Nevertheless, tentative whirlwinds of snow sometimes swept the avenues, twisting about in gray light. The city had not yet been interred in its January shroud, and the fact that the streets were still bare gave December the air of fall, just as reluctant snowbanks can give the air of December even to May.
This was t
he first city he had ever seen that immediately spoke for itself, as if it had no people and were a system of empty canyons cutting across the desert in the west. The overwhelming mass of its architecture, in which time crossed and mixed, did not ask for attention shyly, like Paris or Copenhagen, but demanded it like a centurion barking orders. Great plumes of steam a hundred stories tall, river traffic that ran a race to silver bays, and countless thousands of intersecting streets that sometimes would break away from the grid and soar over the rivers on the flight path of a high bridge, were merely the external signs of something deeper that was straining hard to be.
Hardesty knew right off that an unseen force was breathing under all the gray, that the events and miracles of the city were simply the effect of this force as it turned in its sleep, that it saturated everything, and that it had sculpted the city before it had even opened its eyes. He felt it striving in everything he saw, and knew that the entire population, though prideful of its independence, was subject to a complete and intense orchestration the likes of which he had never imagined. They rushed about here and there, venting their passions—struggling, kicking, and shuddering like marionettes. Ten minutes after he left the station, he saw a taxi driver kill a peddler in an argument over who had the right of way on an empty street. He wanted no part of this city. It was too gray, cold, and dangerous. It was perhaps the grayest, coldest, most dangerous city in the world. He understood why young people from all over came to pit themselves against it. But he was too old for such things, and he had already been to war.
Furthermore, his intention was to look throughout Europe for a beautiful city that (momentarily, at least) might be entirely just. In such a city all forces would smoothly align, and all balances would be brought even. That would never occur in this ragged place of too much energy and too many loose ends that lashed about like taut cables which suddenly are parted. New York could never be fully at peace with itself; nor could any one vision defeat, compress, and control its crooked and varied time, for this would require the perfect and able recognition of signal beauties, and a gift of unforeseen grace. Never would New York know perfect justice, despite the greatness of its views and its well-plotted interweaving of the magnificent and the small.
For Hardesty, who was in poor spirits after a long and difficult train journey in which he had zigzagged over half of Pennsylvania and been shunted for hours into industrial towns where there were only liquor stores and snowmobile repair shops, New York was a difficult city, far too rich in the ugly, the absurd, the monstrous, the hideous, and the unbearable. Everything capable of being exaggerated or distorted, was. Normally acceptable customs and occurrences were changed into startling nightmares. The very life functions were transformed. Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible. Battalions of heinous voluptuaries corrupted eating into a sport of pigs. Sex was for sale as a commodity, like roasted peanuts or manganese. Even elimination, never the most regal thing, was dragged down to baser levels by snorting, grunting dilapidations who squatted mercilessly upon the sidewalk in full public view.
But then the wind changed, the light came out, and he was caught up in some sort of magic. For no apparent reason, he suddenly became king of the world, and was overflowing with the schemes and riches of mania. His heart was pumping so vigorously that he thought he was undergoing an attack. Though suddenly ecstatic, he retained enough presence of mind to try to determine why his emotions had flipped upside down. He thought it might have had something to do with the city itself, since everyone he could see was either weeping at death’s door or dancing with hat and cane. The city seemed to have no middle ground. Certainly the poor were poor and the rich were rich as nowhere else. But, here, wealthy women in sables and diamonds sifted through garbage cans, and paupers who slept above subway gratings strutted down the street declaiming furiously about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve. He saw great numbers of men who were women, and women who were men. And, in Madison Square Park, there were two lunatics in bedsheets, circling one another like fighting cocks, screaming that they had found a magic mirror.
Hardesty decided to deposit his check in a reputable bank and figure out later whether he would stay for a while in New York or immediately go to Italy on one of the many steamships the deep whistles of which he could hear as they started downriver and across the sea more casually than canoes on a millpond. In San Francisco, walking into a bank was like walking into a palace—which was the way it should have been. But in New York, banks were cathedrals, which was perhaps not the way it should have been. If a law had been passed to change each bank into a church and each second vice-president into a priest, New York would instantly have become the center of Christendom. Hardesty slapped down his gambling check on a waxed marble counter in the Tenth Street branch of the Hudson and Atlantic Trust.
The teller appraised it with a professional stare. “We’re not taking these,” he said. “We had a telex this morning instructing us to refuse any checks drawn on Harvesters and Planters in St. Louis. I imagine it’s gone under. I suggest that you go to our main office on Wall Street. They might be able to clarify the order.”
This complication moderated Hardesty’s mania, and though he found himself on an even keel when he walked into the Hudson and Atlantic headquarters in the financial district, the only reaction appropriate for its interior was a gasp of wonder. A cream-colored marble floor stretched away like the wheat fields of Kansas. Messengers on bicycles carried documents and dispatches over it from one department to another. When a small child deliberately released a toy helium balloon, everyone watched it drift up to the ceiling, where it seemed as small as a grain of sand.
A bank officer who didn’t like the way Hardesty was dressed told him, showing a newspaper to prove it, that the St. Louis bank had failed. “You have three choices,” he said. “You can hang on to the check and become a creditor (or hope that someday they’ll get back on their feet), you can sell it as an acceptance for about a cent and a half on the dollar, or you can tear it up.”
Hardesty thought it best to rent a safe deposit box in which to store the discredited check. Perhaps in twenty years, like a locust, it would rise to fly. And, if he could lease a box wide enough, he would put the salver in it too—since he did not fancy carrying around many pounds of gold and silver in a city where, it was said, every tenth citizen was a thief.
Deep below the wheat-field floor were marble chambers and barred cages. Hardesty found himself in a little cell with an enormous metal box, in which he placed the salver and the check. He looked up. From all around came chants and tones, as if prayers were being said in the warrens of a Tibetan monastery. A score or more of middle-aged men in cells like his own were counting their coupons and their certificates in low voices imbued with the gravity of final reckoning. He leaned back in his chair, lit his pipe, and listened. The sounds of shuffling and counting were as tranquil as the lapping of a lake. The occasional shuddering metallic rattle of steel grates, and of locks set and unset, made long-lasting echoes, and the whir of combination wheels was like the purring of a cat. In the dimly lit cell, Hardesty watched his pipe smoke wind to the ceiling. He stayed there for several hours, thinking about what he had to do next.
In his pocket was a long letter in his own handwriting from Mrs. Gamely to Virginia. The letter itself was a puzzle, being beautiful yet utterly incomprehensible unless one were to have the humiliating experience of using a dictionary to understand one’s own language. It read like a runic ode, but was dotted here and there with plain English gossip, quotations, recipes, and news about the condition of crops, lake, and various forms of animals identified by name and species (Grolier the Pig, Concord the Goose, etc.).
Mrs. Gamely had taken him aside and dictated it to him, making him promise to deliver it personally, because, as she said, “Coheerie’s mail is heteronomic and ludibund.” The problem was that Virginia’s mail, whet
her or not heteronomic and ludibund, did not get through, and her whereabouts were a mystery. But Mrs. Gamely had made Hardesty swear that he would seek her out before he left New York. Upon asking what he should do if he could not find her, Mrs. Gamely had replied, “Keep looking.” Now, because the bank in St. Louis had failed, Hardesty no longer had as much time as he had thought he would have. He wondered how he would find Virginia Gamely, and he half regretted that he had agreed to do so.
But that is not to say that he was not pleased with the city, and with the prospect of searching through it.
SOON IT was dark, and people were gathering for dinner or hot drinks in restaurants and cafés with slanted glass awnings that were covered with snow. But Hardesty passed by these places and did not come in from the cold until he came to the library. This was the deepest place in the city, for its hundred million isles were further subdivided into countless patterns, chapters, themes, words, and letters. The letters were merely lines derived from a series of coordinates, which the eye pieced together and united in a riverlike flow, as if all the bent and convoluted little sticks were the lights of a cityscape that was beautiful from afar. In fact, when Hardesty walked among the books that lined the high walls of the main reading room, he felt as if he were walking into a city. The plain of tables and readers flanked on four sides by tall rectangular bookcases was a parody of Central Park, especially since the reading lamps were as green as grass.
While scholars were returning to their nocturnal labors after meager dinners of bile and gravel, Hardesty began his researches. He was in his natural element, he knew what to do, and he moved fast because the walk in the cold had made him alert. First he went through every conceivable directory, looking for Virginia Gamely’s name. He even went into the reception hall and called directory assistance to see if she had an unpublished number. Evidently, she didn’t have a telephone—at least not in her own name. Hardesty called the police, who could not help, they said, because they were too busy chasing criminals and sleeping in patrol cars under bridges. Besides, why was it their business?
