by Mark Helprin
“Excuse me,” Hardesty said. “I’m trying to find someone who came originally from the Lake of the Coheeries, where the Penns once had a summer house. It may have been foolish for me to have come here, but I have no other connections and no other way to locate her. I would like to ask Harry Penn if he knows where she is, or for suggestions about how to find her.”
“Are you looking for Virginia Gamely?” Praeger asked.
“That’s exactly who I’m looking for.”
“She works here.”
“Then I’ve found her.”
“But she’s not here now. We just put The Whale to bed, and she’s on The Sun. She comes in at six in the morning.”
“My name is Hardesty Marratta. I was on the Polaris. . . . I have a letter from her mother.”
“I can give it to her.”
“Her mother made me promise to do it myself.”
Praeger introduced himself and invited Hardesty into his office on the floor above (to which they ascended via a cast-iron spiral staircase that pierced the ceiling) to talk about what Hardesty had seen in Lake of the Coheeries. Praeger had been interested in the place from the time that Virginia had first brought it up and then conspired with Jessica Penn not to mention it ever again. He was interested in Hardesty’s descriptions, both for their content and because he recognized that, like Virginia, Hardesty had a gift for language. “I don’t know what it is about Lake of the Coheeries,” Praeger said, “or even if Lake of the Coheeries does, in fact, exist. But everyone who passes through it seems to acquire a way with words that I like very much. Maybe we’ll have some seminars up there (if we can get to it), or bottle the water for our coolers.”
They spoke for several hours, touching upon a dozen or more subjects and discovering that their views were remarkably similar. They were weary and relaxed; they both loved the strain of winter; they enjoyed one another’s sharp conversation; and they got along extremely well, except for one thing. They disagreed about the nature of the city itself.
Hardesty was in no mood for toleration of its numerous and outstanding urban deformities, and would not forgive what he took to be the unnecessary roughness of its inhabitants and the rigid way that it was laid out, architected, built, fixed, and maintained. He hated it as if he were about to love it—unforgivingly, irrationally, sadly. Though they were beautiful and magnetic, the deep-throated whistles that shot through the snow and rattled the windows of The Sun made him uneasy, and the thought of the endless internal horizons incorporated into the streets, bends, alleys, and roosts made him extremely uncomfortable.
Praeger had seen this before. “You’ll soon be forever in love with the things you now despise,” he said.
“That’s what you think,” returned Hardesty. “I’m on my way to Europe. I’m not going to be here long enough to fall in love with anything at all.”
“The anarchy will hold you.”
“How could it? It’s what I detest the most.”
“You know that it isn’t anarchy at all, and that, even if it is, it contains all the possibilities you seek. And you must know, as well, that the very fact the city survives and remains on its feet implies an equilibrium, which, in turn, implies the presence of a high and opposing force for each category of degradation.”
“I don’t see them. Do you?”
“Only rarely. But when I do, I can see that the balances are maintained. I can see traces of a perfect age, in the way that veins of the roughest ore can lead to gold.”
“And what if the ugliness and the horror wear you down until you are unable to appreciate what you hope for, should it arrive.”
“So much the better. I love the risk. I like it that—try as I might—the outcome is hardly up to me. The plans for the city were drawn on the same table as the plans for war. It promises nothing, and yet it can be inimitably generous. You should stay awhile and get some idea of how it works. Listen to the ship whistles. When you hear them, summer and winter, they become a song, a message. I always think that they’re saying, ‘Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.’”
They parted uneasily, because Hardesty resented that Praeger had predicted a change in him, and Praeger resented having had to do it. What did Praeger care, anyway, about what Hardesty thought? But he promised to introduce Hardesty to Virginia the next day at four, just after The Sun was put to bed.
Hardesty walked five miles through a driving snowstorm to the Hotel Lenore, a tall tower in midtown that caught the snow against its high glass sides and sent it falling in bushels like white water dashing through a flume. The streets had been as empty as the prairie, and while they were white it had seemed as if the possibilities of which Praeger had spoken were indeed present in the hot and icy spaces in which the city’s wars of equilibrium were waged.
The night manager gave Hardesty the highest room in the hotel. Because he had found Virginia, and could leave New York in a day or two, Hardesty felt that he could afford the astronomical price. He had left The Sun at one in the morning. Now it was so far in the middle of the night that the clocks had quit, and time seemed to have been obliterated by the raging storm.
When he arrived in his room on the 120th floor, he went to the window and peered into the skein of wind-snarled white ebbing and flowing against the glass. This was a frustrating, hard, unforgiving, unkind city, strong on suffering, punishment, and murderous weather. Its climate and population were a scythe that swept relentlessly until even the strong fell before it, and the weak in their great numbers vanished from the streets forever and died unremembered in the cold and dark. Standing on the 120th floor, he could see nothing—and he took that to be the signature of the city.
Nonetheless, Hardesty was cheered when he discovered that there was a sauna in the bathroom. Soon after he stepped in and closed the cedar door, the heat began to come up and a bank of sunlights blazed. After trudging across the arctic boweries, he was delighted to find himself in a dry desert, but he was so cold that it took him forty-five minutes to work up a sweat.
The next day, he would deliver the letter to Virginia Gamely, and, if he were lucky, board a liner that would charge the ice and break from the harbor. Then its whistle blasts would be in his favor, not against him. But they seemed not to be against Praeger, certainly, who thought they were like an organ in a church, commanding attention, calling forth those emotions that shook the body like a reed. Hardesty heard the deep whistles even in the desert on the 120th floor, at three, or four, or five, or whatever o’clock it was in the morning. How is it, he thought, that the whistles are shrieking now? Can ships be leaving at this time, in the teeth of the storm? And who hears them?
Ceaseless activity, even when everyone was presumed to be asleep, suggested to him that the city did have a life of its own, and that there was indeed something underneath, slowly and methodically working its way out.
Nearly faint, he emerged from the sauna and went to the window. The storm was still raging, but, staring into it, he became aware of a glow. Straight on, it, too, must have been high in the air, and it appeared to grow stronger as the wind went mad and rocked the steel cliff in which he stood.
Then, as if the snow were fog and the hotel were a ship, a space opened up as if to accommodate motion, and a lighted tower came into view suspended in the maelstrom and seemingly independent of the ground. It was the top of an old skyscraper—floodlighted in blue, white, and silver. Though the snow obscured it at times with a transparent curtain, it always managed to shine through, as bright as a halo. Toward morning, when dawn made the blizzard gray and the world was clouded over, the tower was lost.
THE MORNING was as clear as glass. Hardesty went to the window and surveyed a forest of high towers slicing up the wind that came down from Canada herding the color blue before it like a vast number of sheep. On distant bridges, golden streams of glinting mica—cars in the morning sun—moved to and from the
city. And the sisters of the ships he had heard in the storm, ships as big as cities used to be, placidly crossed the wave-etched harbor, sliding over high whitecaps like a hot iron on linen.
In the streets, people were jumping like puppets, racing around at a speed that astonished even them. On those clear icy days when the full moon could not even wait for the dark, and circled the sun in the sky, they danced in what they did, they were like racehorses in the paddock, they acted like people who have discovered something great, and, in justifying the saying that New York is a city which dies and rises the way other cities go to bed at night and get up in the morning, they made the long lean island of Manhattan ring and tremble like an unsheathed sword.
Hardesty took nearly the whole day to push through these lunatics on his way to Printing House Square. They would give neither him nor anyone else an inch. Lines of traffic bolted through red lights. Bakery trucks raced on the main avenues at 125 miles per hour, assassinating bicyclists and pedestrians. Balkan pretzel vendors in two-foot-thick padded clothing and fleecy aviator caps charged each other with their flame-holding wagons, bumping like buffalos, to lay claim to a corner. With attaché cases strapped to their backs, stockbrokers in three-piece suits raced in life or death agony on cross-country skis from Riverside Drive to Wall Street. On one bustling avenue, the second story of each commercial building on both sides of the street for five miles was the home of a karate dojo. Hardesty walked past these during the lunch hour, and heard several hundred thousand combative screams, as figures in white sailed through the air, legs cocked and arms outstretched, like Russian dancers. There were fires blazing on every corner, mortal arguments on each block, robberies in commission, buildings attacked by squads of devilish wreckers, and buildings assembled by construction workers who rode single cables until they disappeared into the sky. Hardesty found it difficult to get downtown and stay the same. The city wanted fuel for its fires, and it reached out with leaping tongues of gravity and flame to pull people in, size them up, dance with them a little, sell them a suit—and then devour them.
It was late and dark by the time he reached Printing House Square, where The Sun’s offices faced those of The Ghost across the way. The Ghost had large electric signs on its huge headquarters, proclaiming its success and popularity, whereas The Sun glowed gently from inside a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture. Hardesty bounded up the stairs to Praeger de Pinto’s office. His rapidly beating heart was whipped on even faster when he found Praeger de Pinto and Virginia sitting together on Praeger’s leather couch, closely and easily enough to suggest that they were perhaps more than just comfortable with one another. Intense jealousy struck him like a missile. The agony was physical. Damn this city, where there was no justice and never would be. He knew upon seeing Virginia’s eyes that this was the woman for him, and he cursed the timing of it, since he could see that she and Praeger. . . . But then he thought that maybe he was just imagining it, for when Praeger stood to greet him it appeared as if the distance between Praeger and Virginia on the couch had been at least a foot. A foot and a half, he thought, full of hope, perhaps even two feet. Hardesty decided that this lovely unselfconscious woman with long black hair and supremely intelligent eyes, would soon be his wife—Praeger or no Praeger. “I’ll crush him like a tsetse fly,” Hardesty said out loud, without knowing it.
“Who?” asked Praeger. Virginia was curious as well, and already smitten.
“Craig Binky,” Hardesty blurted out, fast on his feet.
“Oh,” said Praeger. “We all would like to do that. But what brought you into the fold so soon?”
“I saw today’s Ghost. Infuriating.”
Virginia smiled. From the way Hardesty had looked at her, the slight shake in his voice, and his unhappiness, she knew that he had fallen in love. This showed a certain weakness of character, yes, but it was a commitment she could not ignore. Though she tried to hang on to the steep slopes down which she felt herself sliding, after just a few minutes she gave up entirely. Still, she did not want to be rash—she had a child to consider, because she had been rash once before.
Praeger de Pinto, who had always been and would ever be in love with Jessica Penn, stepped back slowly from the awkward conversation and the not-quite-regular breathing, and watched Hardesty and Virginia discover one another while the shifts changed on the two papers and Printing House Square filled with crowds of pressmen, copy boys, and clerical workers treading down the snow.
Before Hardesty delivered Mrs. Gamely’s letter, he spoke of the Polaris and of how, by accident, he had come to Lake of the Coheeries. As he spoke, he could feel Virginia’s love for the landscape he was describing. He was glad that it was winter, when love and ambition flare in the cold. Perhaps if she had not been framed by the dark glass behind her and the snowy square dazzling with the lights of The Ghost, he would not have been able to talk to her in a way that almost trumpeted his intentions—that is, to everyone except Virginia, who valued them so much that she could not be sure of the obvious.
After a while, they looked up and discovered that Praeger was gone.
“How long do you think he’s been out of the room?” Virginia asked with a smile.
“I don’t know,” Hardesty replied. “But let’s have dinner.”
“I have to feed the baby,” she said. “Mrs. Solemnis likes to leave by six.”
Hardesty’s confidence left him a lot faster than it had come. Again, he felt physical pain.
Then she looked at him and said, “I’m not married.”
They didn’t find Praeger, but as they left the building, those of her colleagues who passed Virginia saw from Hardesty’s look of unsteady triumph, and from her devilish, luminous blushing, that they had cause to give her quick knowing smiles—which only made her avert her eyes in delight.
Hardesty had laid aside his sheepskin jacket in favor of a charcoal-gray woolen greatcoat for which he had traded a good portion of his reserves. He commented on this, and on how much warmer the sheepskin jacket had been, even if it hadn’t been as long. “Oh no,” Virginia said, “I love that coat. I wouldn’t want you to walk around in a shearling jacket. Not in the city, anyway. Wearing wilderness clothes here is as foolish as wearing city clothes in the wilderness.” They walked into the ferocious north wind, letting it sweep over their faces as if they were bathing in a river. He didn’t dare take her arm when they crossed congested avenues, though he very much wanted to. She said she liked his coat, and she was bringing him home for dinner. At the moment, that was enough for him.
The Chinese and Italian markets lay together back to back. Hardesty and Virginia went through the many acres of stalls, row after row, as if they were walking alone in the spring. The fruits and vegetables stacked in the cold reminded them of a garden, and the dead fish with mouths open in shock had the expressions of leaping trout. “I torment The Ghost sometimes,” Virginia said, “by following them in their pieces and doing a better job. It drives them mad. This summer they did an article on the Chinese and Italian markets, and, as usual, all they talked about was the food. As far as The Ghost is concerned, if you can’t put it in your mouth, its incomprehensible.”
“I know,” said Hardesty. “I was rather amazed to see that page one of today’s Ghost had a two-column headline about a new way to braise artichokes.”
“Of course. They do that all the time on page one—black borders if someone’s souffle falls, banner headlines about a new kind of sauce. . . . I wrote an essay three days later, and I didn’t mention food once. And yet, I think it was a better description of the market than they had, because the least of the market is the food.”
“What is it then?” Hardesty asked, though he already knew.
“Buying and selling, faces, the color, the light, the stories that breed within it, its spirit. Where else would you find all these clear lights strung so high and gleaming in the cold?” she asked, indicating the chains of electric bulbs over the stalls. “Harry Penn got a telegram from Craig Bi
nky, that said, ‘How can you cover the market and not mention food?’ Imagine, they send telegrams between two offices on the same square. Harry Penn cabled back, ‘Eating assassinates the spirit.’
“I like to eat,” she said. “In fact, I’m hungry right now. But a rack of lamb is not the Roman Empire.”
They bought a cut of steak and half a dozen kinds of vegetables, and they walked back through the acres of pearly lights, watching their breath condense in white clouds before them. “My house is that way,” Virginia said, “but I don’t want to go through the Five Points; it’s too dangerous. So let’s walk up to Houston, and circle back.”
“That’ll take three times as long,” Hardesty stated. “Why not walk through the Five Points? I went in there today and nothing happened.”
“You were lucky. Besides, it’s dark.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hardesty. “Thieves sleep in early evening.”
The Five Points had seen bandits of many races and ethnicities roost on its roosts and snake about in its alleys. Fashions in crime and demeanor had changed with the times, the languages, and the temptations. But, essentially, the thieves and brigands were the same, and their weapons were the knife, the club, and the gun. Hardesty was right, though. They rested in early evening, for they were alive only after a few hours of darkness. The streets were empty and winter had left its charm at the boundaries of the Five Points—which was like a cave without an exit. Hardesty and Virginia had the sense that they were being observed from darkened windows. The only thing they heard was the ringing of a faraway bell, and hideous laughter greeting it from within the broken tenements as if to say that its pure sound was here powerless and corruptible.
