by Mark Helprin
Having overturned all the easy stones, he started on the boulders. Since Mrs. Gamely hadn’t the vaguest idea of where her daughter was, Hardesty decided to accomplish in the library what he had been unable to do at Mrs. Gamely’s because she had been too busy to make associations. He would find out about Lake of the Coheeries, and, by discovering its characteristics, deduce enough about Virginia to help him track her down. First, the atlas. But Lake of the Coheeries was not in the index, and, in the place where he knew that he had been, the map showed a strangely empty patch of green with occasional relief and a nameless river or two. The detailed maps, the official surveys, and the historical gazetteers were similarly uninformative.
Wherever he turned, he came up with a blank. The name was unrecorded. After four and a half hours of puzzlement, he quit for the night just as the library was about to close. If there was nothing about Lake of the Coheeries in this great repository, there was likely to be nothing anywhere. While he was putting on his coat in the marble reception hall, he asked the library clicker—a man so old that he looked inside-out—if he knew of a cheap place to stay. “I have limited funds,” Hardesty said, “and I’m looking for someplace that’s simple, clean, and inexpensive. I don’t need a bathroom in my room.”
“Who has a bathroom in the room?” asked the old man, whose job was to press a clicker every time someone walked by. (It had been a long tradition at the library and could not be abandoned, and he didn’t know how to do anything else.) “The bathroom’s another room. It can’t be in the same room unless it’s right in the middle like a big box, and they don’t got that.”
“That’s right,” said Hardesty. “Good thinking. What I mean is that I don’t need a private bathroom, connected to my room.”
“How about sharing a room, sort of?” asked the old man.
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
“What I mean is that the Widow Endicott takes in boarders.”
“More than one to a room?”
“Not exactly, but it’s cheap. And its clean. You look like a strong young man.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“The Widow Endicott has got certain appetites. She makes certain demands. Understand?”
“What’s she like?” Hardesty asked.
“What’s she like? Oh Lordy! What she is like! If only she’d been around when I was able.”
“I might as well look at the place,” Hardesty said. “Where is it?”
“Yeah. You might as well look at the place. You wouldn’t want to disappoint a poor widow, would ya? Very kind of you. It’s on Second Avenue, way downtown. I don’t know what street crosses it, but it’s near the old Coheeries Theater.”
“The what theater?” Hardesty shouted.
“The Coheeries Theater. They don’t call it that anymore, but I remember when they used to have stage plays there. Now they use it for wrestling, dance shows, and vaudeville.”
“What do you know about the theater?”
“In general?”
“The Coheeries Theater.”
“Just what I told you.”
“Do you know why it was called that?”
“Let me see. Why was it called . . . I dunno. I never thought about it. Maybe it’s a kind of clam or something, and when the curtain went up on the plays—Shakespeare—it was like a clamshell opening.”
“Thanks,” said Hardesty, and was off into the winter night to see what he could find out about the place from the place itself.
The marquee of the Coheeries Theater had written upon it the words “Lucha Libre,” and all the stores for ten blocks around were boarded up, though diagonally across the avenue was the Widow Endicott’s boardinghouse, the very sight of which made Hardesty’s heart jump with fear and curiosity. Even if she turned out, in fact, to be a hag, the house itself was magnificent. Candles burned in the windows, the brass shone like gold, and the eaves and trim were kept up as if the place were a national monument.
The theater had seen much better days. Forty people sat in the front rows, eating shish kabab or hot pretzels and awaiting the wreck of vaudeville, which had been resurrected for those too poor to have a television set. After picking his way over pools of sticky litter and through drifts of spilled popcorn, Hardesty took a seat in the middle of the house. Just as he looked up, the lights dimmed and the curtain was raised. He could see that the once-elegant dome and walls were covered with murals and scrollwork. But it was too dark to make out details, and he contented himself with watching the show. For the lighting, though more than half a century old, cut out all the world except the velvety dream beyond the footlights. The darkness popped with remembered silver flashes, and the colored gels and beams were as fresh as the face of a young girl who has been out in the snow.
First came two comedians. Their jokes were in Yiddish though their audience was in Spanish; their toupees were of a material that resembled orange excelsior; and they went through their routines with closed eyes.
Then came a bicycle act during which a frightfully skinny Sicilian rode a bicycle around the stage for about five minutes. When the booing became too much for him to bear, he screwed up his features in pain and determination, and tried to stand on his head on the seat. It had been enough for him just to peddle, for he was in truth not very good at riding a bicycle. But when he tried to stand on his head, he lost control of his vehicle, and he and it flew over the apron into an empty row of seats.
Next came a well-worn group called The Singing Cucumbers. How they had managed to stay out of the salad for three-quarters of a century was a mystery of considerable grandeur. In cucumber costumes, straw boaters, canes, spats, and pencil mustaches, they sang three songs—“The Mice Made a Break for Freedom,” “Beethoven’s Nephew,” and “The Boer War Triangle.”
Despite their incapacities, these touching, persistent, third-rate—seventh-rate—theatrical people strove to excel. They thought that they were artists: they said so on their tax forms and in bus stations in northeastern Delaware, and they almost had it right, for they were not artists, but art. They were in themselves like sad songs, or revealing portraits. Something about them was terribly moving. They never gave up. They never could see very clearly beyond their driven ambitions. And they had never figured out that their every move made them part of a sad tableau.
Last on the bill was a dancing act. Three odd young girls who called themselves The Spielers danced in wooden shoes and green homespun dresses. A card on a tripod identified them as Little Liza Jane, Dolly, and Bosca, the dark girl. They jumped and twirled in strange jigs, and seemed not to notice that they were onstage in a theater. They loved to dance. They danced with each other three at a time. They smiled. And in the end they gave three lovely and innocent bows.
The lights came up before the wrestling, giving Hardesty a chance to study the murals. A dozen scenes from Lake of the Coheeries were clearly depicted in shady old oils. Here was the lake in summer, spring, and fall, ice-covered in winter. Here was the village, under the stars, in the snow, or surrounded by somnolent crops. Here were iceboating, and a strange gazebo on the lake. Here were village girls, farmers, and a horse pulling a sled. But in the dome of the theater was the most unusual picture of them all. It showed an island in the lake, at night. Rising from it was a whitened column of stars, as if the Milky Way had dipped down in imitation of a rainbow.
What Hardesty next saw pushed him down in his seat and made him tremble. Engraved around the dome in letters that now were so dirty that they could hardly be seen, were the words, “For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone?”
The wrestling was half over by the time Hardesty made his way out of the theater. Just before the exit was a plaque stating that the Coheeries Theater had been donated to the city by Isaac Penn. This was a lead, though undoubtedly blind, that he would have to follow. But he wanted to sleep, and the nearest place was the boardinghouse diagonally across the stree
t.
The coincidence of inscriptions could not possibly have been more than just that. Certainly the perfectly just city would never arise on these unclean ruins, not in the lap of an industrial civilization known primarily for civilization in the breach, not in a noisy inhumane city fashioned in gray after the image of a machine, nor from amid the soot-covered spires, the ice-choked riverways, and the endless avenues of careless war-torn architecture. No. Everything he knew told him that it could never be so. It was merely a coincidence, and would not keep him from traveling on. Still, he was dazed.
And he was putty in the hands of the Widow Endicott.
SHE WAS a red-haired beauty, an Amazon, almost as big as the marble statue of Diana in the park at Winky’s Hill. Ten husbands had died in her bed, so she started a boardinghouse for young men just in from the country. These she shuffled around among several rooms that adjoined her own, and among the baths, showers, and saunas in which she kept them ready at a moment’s notice to pop in and copulate. She was perfect and insatiable. Each breast was a marvel. Her forest of red pubic hair was soft, fragrant, and deep. She was as white as ivory but glossed in red because of her red hair and the rhythmic undercolor of her fine skin as the blood beat through it.
She liked that Hardesty was trim and strong, and she put him close by. From the way that she looked at him, he suspected that he would be making love to her soon. He went to his room, undressed, and got into bed. When he was half asleep, protesting in a borderless meditation the notion that New York might be anything but a crowded tool chest on a slag heap of materialism, the connecting doors to the widow’s room flew open.
He walked carefully through a small passageway into her bedchamber, which was entirely white. Even the floor was white, and there were no windows, only a skylight. In a small fireplace a cherry basket of glowing coals rested on the bars of an iron grate, pulsing like a Pittsburgh open hearth. The Widow Endicott was redolent in her white bed in the light of the seething coals. She was undulating as she lay back, her hips propped up on a big pillow. Hardesty saw beneath the white silky skin an outline of delicate ribs. She was an essay in red; her deep auburn hair, her lips just slightly apart, the tips of her breasts—as short, slight, and red as a scarlet brush stroke—and her red pubic hair gleaming like a Pacific forest. Though Hardesty wished that he were a painter, so that he might paint her, paint her is not what he did.
Hardesty’s useless struggles at the library the evening before were well compensated twenty-four hours later, after he had spent most of the day recovering. Though there was not a single reference to Lake of the Coheeries, and the word Coheeries itself probably did not exist in any of the books in the library, entries for Isaac Penn filled several card drawers, and Hardesty soon found himself in the Penn archives, surrounded not only by books but by pamphlets, broadsides, photographs, letters, and manuscripts. A large number of letters and telegrams had been sent via Hudson or by hand. The Penns, a family associated with newspapers, whaling, and the arts (there was even a young collection on Jessica Penn—a Broadway actress of whom Hardesty had heard), maintained a summer house in a place that was never identified as anything but “L of C.”
Enough material rested in the archives to absorb several scholars in long and productive careers, but Hardesty was drawn mainly to the photographs, of which there were thousands—all black and white—in the powerful, communicative style of the nineteenth century, when sensibilities born of painting contributed to photography what photography itself would soon help to obliterate.
These pictures were chronologically arranged in brass-hinged albums of varnished cherrywood. Each turning of a page revealed a photograph with a key in which the subjects were identified and the setting was explained. If one were to have judged the turn of the century solely by this record, one might have thought that it was a time devoted primarily to rowboats, toboggans, snow shoes, tennis racquets, oceangoing yachts, and outdoor furniture. The Penns loved to take pictures of themselves as they played sports, or sat in the summer sun looking over the sea. Although quite a few shots were of Isaac Penn at public functions or in the midst of his staff on The Sun, and some were of Beverly playing the piano, Jack doing an experiment with his chemistry set, or Jayga standing in an imperial pose, arms akimbo, in front of her stove, most were of the family together. They were gathered in the snow, picnicking in high meadows, racing horses, rowing in the August heat, or walking along the beach at the end of day—sunburnt, healthy, listening to the slowly unfurling waves.
As the history of the Penns unfolded for Hardesty, welling up from the past with surprising vitality, he noticed two things especially. Two changes were unexplained among the many changes that were to be expected: after all, from his perspective in the future, Hardesty was not surprised that the infant Harry quickly grew until (in two hours) he was in command of a regiment; or by the staccato freezing and unfreezing of the lake; or when (from one wooden album to another) lovely little Willa became lean and, yet, voluptuous, in a way that reached out to Hardesty across a good part of the century. From his godlike perspective, he was able to gloss over minor inconsistencies and not worry about people who appeared and disappeared, or changes in posture, decor, and fashion. He was, after all, floating in a lake of a hundred eventful years.
But the archivists had done such a good job that when they faltered Hardesty wondered why. The inconsistencies which stayed with him were that Beverly seemed always to be in a stronger light than anyone else (some of the pictures betrayed an aura that not even the chroniclers had noticed—much less those in the scene), and that someone appeared for a short time in one of the cold and snowy years immediately preceding the Great War, and remained unidentified. He looked neither like the Penns, nor like a servant, nor like a member of the upper classes. He had a rough, solid, workingman’s manner, and one could tell even from a photograph that he spoke English the way the Irish did, that he was strong, and that he was good with tools. His burly hands were not made for a pen or a piano. He might have been the foreman of The Sun’s mechanics, the keeper of their farms in Amagansett, or the captain of one of Isaac Penn’s merchantmen—but he wasn’t, because he was often dressed like a dandy, he always stood near Beverly, and, in one picture, he had put his arms around her with a tenderness that caused Hardesty to stare transfixed at the photograph for fifteen minutes. Hardesty felt that this man’s affection, like Willa’s coming into womanhood, was able almost to burn through the pages. It was far more than affection that moved him. It was love. And then Hardesty discovered the strangest series of images. A somber wedding, with Beverly—hardly able to stand—supported on the man’s arm. A long string of photographs of an island in the lake, bare and trembling in winter, almost indistinguishable from the snow-covered ice.
In none of the photographs was the stranger identified. Underneath his silhouette in the key to each picture in which he appeared was simply a question mark. Who was he? The meticulous archivists did not know, and apologized for not being able to explain him. A note attached to the last binder said that the living members of the Penn family had refused to comment on their photographic history, or, for that matter, even to review the collection.
Hardesty studied the interloper’s face. He liked it. He liked it very much, and he was moved by the half-unnamed couple who simply disappeared, and who, apparently, would be forgotten for all time.
But he did find what he was looking for, more or less. Here and there, perched on a haystack or ensconced in the upper scroll of a horse-drawn sled, were Gamelys—healthy yeomen, children, local people of the lake, who obviously knew the Penns and spent time with them. Though the Penns seemed to have left Lake of the Coheeries, disintegrated, and been frozen in place within their own dynastic archives, Hardesty decided to seek them out, in the hope that Virginia Gamely had done so, too.
AS GREAT as the city was in nearly all respects, it had one unaccountable and unforgivable failing. For the many many millions of people, there were only two major news
papers. True, one could buy ten or twelve pages of day-old news in any language of the world and in any alphabet, and hundreds of stations crowded the electronic spectrum, like the bands of a coral snake, but the population as a whole was regretfully polarized: one followed either The Sun or The Ghost.
There was a Morning Ghost and an Evening Ghost (more correctly: The New York Ghost, Morning Edition, and The New York Ghost, Evening Edition), and there were The New York Morning Whale and The New York Evening Sun. Their rivalry straddled both editions, dusk and dawn. Anyone native to the city knew this apposition as readily as night and day, light and dark, or fat and thin. But Hardesty did not. So when he came to a newsstand on an empty street corner, a lighthouse amid a sea of swirling blue snow, he was surprised to discover that The Sun was indeed still in the hands of the Penn family, and that Harry Penn—infant turned regimental commander—was its editor and publisher. He went down to Printing House Square at ten o’clock, assuming that at that hour a newspaper would be in the middle of a sprint for the deadline.
In fact, it was sprinting so hard that no one noticed Hardesty or would answer any of his questions. For two hours, he stayed in the middle of The Sun’s glassed-in courtyard, watching the snow brush against the transparent roof many stories above as hundreds of reporters, copy boys, messengers, worried editors, and inky printers crisscrossed around him heading from one door to another or, up and down the open stairs that led to each of the floors looking over the enclosed court. But then, at midnight, everything stopped except the presses—which began to rumble on the bottom floors, like the engines of a ship, as if they were not merely stamping out impressions, but moving the building ahead in a turbulent and foggy sea. Hardesty went to the city room, on the third floor, where he stopped the first person he met. This was, in fact, Praeger de Pinto, the managing editor.
