Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “I know,” Hardesty answered.

  “It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to you. It’s wrong. Maybe, as a widower, I can know things that you can’t. But let me tell you something—you’re an idiot. You’re throwing away the most precious. . . . For Christ’s sake, do I have to explain this to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why not just stay.”

  “I can’t,” Hardesty whispered. “My father.”

  A ship’s whistle rent the air. “Is that the Rosenwald?” Hardesty asked.

  “It may be,” Marko Chestnut replied. “But if it is, it must be heading downriver. Its already twenty after eight.” He smiled.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll remember this!” Hardesty said with a threatening look.

  “You’ll thank me,” Marko Chestnut stated confidently.

  They ran out of the restaurant. Struggling with his easel, Marko Chestnut overturned tables and chairs and broke a lot of china. Hardesty hailed a taxi, and sped south. Marko Chestnut followed. Their two cabs arrived at the Battery simultaneously, and the tourists did not understand what was happening as Hardesty, and Marko Chestnut (lugging easel and paints), ran to the southernmost extension of the promenade, screaming epithets at one another. As trim as an admiral in a new set of whites, the Rosenwald was getting up a good head of steam, and her towering stern had just cleared Liberty Island. Hardesty started to unlace his shoes.

  “What’s the point of swimming?” Marko Chestnut asked. “A ship like that goes twenty knots.”

  “That’s right, and the water’s freezing. I don’t expect to catch it. But I’m going to try, just in case it stops. What can I lose except a little body heat?”

  He dived into the harbor and began to swim. To Marko Chestnut’s amazement, a minute after Hardesty jumped, the Rosenwald sent up a plume of black smoke and went dead in the water.

  THE OFFICERS of the Dutch ship Rosenwald were flattered that Hardesty valued their services enough to immerse himself in the outrageous pudding of filth that passed for water in New York Harbor. They took him down somewhere near the engines and pushed him into a scalding shower, after which the ship’s doctor gave him ten injections, and the chief steward brought him a gallon of beef bouillon. He would have declined an invitation to dine that evening at the captain’s table, had he not been wearing the captain’s own sapphire-colored velvet bathrobe with Holland’s royal crest in gold on the pocket. It is difficult, he reasoned, to refuse an invitation from someone in whose bathrobe one is.

  When Hardesty finally managed to get on deck, he saw New York as it took the strengthening sun. It looked like a piece of flashing jewelry. Nothing of human proportion could be made out amid the blocks and towers. But an occasional dome or the graceful fall of a catenary put the glassy cliffs in scale, and reminded Hardesty that within and among them people were shouting and singing, women were stepping into the shower, and pianos were being played as dancers danced. Virginia was there, somewhere, going about in the summer sun. Not far upriver, newly awakening forests rested between greening fields and blue mountains. Here and there, early summer fires built to clear the forest alleyways of fallen limbs sent up smoke that seemed to climb as slowly and carefully as alpinists.

  It was hard to leave New York in summer, by sea. Hardesty immediately began to miss the city where never-ending avenues jumped over rivers on bridges that habitually bumped the clouds, and where history and the future seemed to run side by side in shock and disorder. And he longed for Virginia. He longed for her so that he wanted to vault the railings and swim to Long Island, though the water was far too cold for him to make it. He realized as well that to do so would probably be considered eccentric, especially in light of the way in which he had come on board. Besides, he would probably get chopped up in the propellers, and his clothes were being laundered and pressed, which meant that even if he survived he would be forced to go naked on land or swim ten miles in a stolen bathrobe. His desire to leave the ship was overwhelmed by such impracticalities, until he saw what lay in the Rosenwald’s path.

  The passengers thought it was only a fogbank. They had entrusted themselves to the Vergeetachtig Oester line and assumed that its officers and representatives would bring them through. But the officers were uncomfortable with what they saw ahead of their ship. Fogbanks do not rise to the top of the sky. Nor do they stretch across the sea for thirty miles in each direction, as straight and smooth as the platinum meter sticks at the Bureau of Postulates in Budapest. Nor do they oscillate, thundering like snare drums.

  The bridge came alive while the captain decided whether to come about and watch this thing work, from a distance, or stick to his course and smash through it. Hardesty went to the bow to get a better look. These were not storm clouds, but a vast white wall that polished the sea at its base into a kind of invisibility. Its hysterical thunder sounded like a terrible argument between Klaxons and foghorns. As the Rosenwald drew closer, the enormity of the wall became overwhelming.

  Despite all their years on the sea and all the electronic instruments they were training in on the cloud wall, they didn’t know what it was. But Hardesty did, which made leaving Virginia out of the question, because it meant that he might never be able to return to her. Virginia had told him about it on several occasions, and he himself had passed through it, though he had been sound asleep on the Polaris as the tops of the cars were polished by a cloud of busy white emery disguised as the fury of winter. How Virginia knew was a mystery. Presumably, her mother had told her.

  Hardesty was unwilling to vanish into indeterminate time. After all, if Virginia were right, the Rosenwald could spend an eternity there, or a second, and emerge either to stun the Iroquois or to find itself in a future it did not understand. And if the Rosenwald and those upon it were ever to return, no one but those who had been there would ever believe them, and they would be condemned to lives of silence or madness.

  In his youth Hardesty had wondered about the feat of jumping from a moving ship. This was a complicated act that was sometimes lethal because of spinning propellers and the tendency of things floating alongside to be drawn into them. After careful thought, the young Hardesty had decided that his best chance would be to leap off the ship, fifteen degrees from its longitudinal axis, with a weight to lessen the possibility of being drawn back into the blades. His father, too, had analyzed the problem. “When you sink about twenty feet,” he had cautioned, “you must compress yourself into a ball to reduce your surface area. That way, you reduce the sail effect and the likelihood of being pushed into the vacuum created by the propellers. Don’t forget to let go of the weight at about forty feet. The ocean is quite deep, you know.”

  The captain of the Rosenwald decided to proceed as if the wall were an ordinary fogbank. When the vessel’s narrow bow plunged into the white cliff, Hardesty sprinted down the main deck, trying to escape sternward. Resigned and expectant, showing the beatific smiles and expressions of those who have apprehended the existence of a better world, the passengers were swallowed up with the superstructure of the now half-vanished ship. As it touched Hardesty’s heel, he felt rapturous pleasure spreading through his entire body, not the kind of sensuality which robs and burns the soul, but something elevated and ecstatic that he knew might take him very far. Still, everything in him told him that the city was better. He had hardly seen it, or felt its scandalous energy. Its towers, bridges, and domes, the river at midday, the life within it; were there to claim. And then, there was Virginia.

  The ship’s forward motion was impressive even for a Dutch liner that had a reputation for being quite speedy. Inches ahead of the wall, Hardesty grabbed a fire bucket full of sand to serve as the weight that would keep him from the propellers. The white froth surrounded one of his legs, weakening him with delight. He wrenched himself away from it, and pushed ahead. As he stood poised on the stern rail, the cloud willowed half his body into ecstasy. He might have given in, had not gravity hurled him into the waves that broke silently
into the invisible space under the wall.

  The Rosenwald disappeared. Hardesty was soon far under water, holding his breath, afraid to let go of the bucket not so much for fear of being drawn into the propellers as for fear of being swallowed by what he had just escaped. He sank deeper and deeper into a freezing green sea that was cold enough to be nearly gelatinous, and emerald to the quick.

  Hardesty dropped the bucket and began to float upward. He suspected that perhaps he had imagined the voracious cloud wall, and wondered what the other passengers had thought when, in the captain’s blue bathrobe, he had run down the deck, seized a fire bucket, and gone over the rail. Then he broke the surface. Neither the ship nor the cloud wall was in sight. He was alone, far from land, in a very cold sea.

  THAT EVENING, as the lights were coming up in the buildings and on the bridges, Asbury Gunwillow guided his small sloop over the chestnut-colored waters of the harbor. He was amazed at the diversity of traffic plying among the many industrial islands, and in the river entrances, channels, straits, and coves. The harbor was complicated enough for Craig Binky once to have called it “octopusine,” and Asbury might easily have bumbled into Jamaica Bay or tried to fight the tidal rush in the East River, were it not for the pilot he had taken on.

  He had been disappointed that the figure floating in a bathrobe—somewhat like Ophelia in her buoyant skirts, but thrashing and garrulous rather than mild and distracted—was not his lost brother, Holman. And, once he had pulled Hardesty in, given him a pair of pants, a navy blue sweatshirt, and enough time to warm up and get oriented, he expected a straight answer when he asked, “How did you get out here?” They were far from land and there were no boats. Thinking to hear that Hardesty was the world’s greatest cold-water swimmer, that his luxury yacht had capsized and gone under, that he had been ejected from a submarine, shot from a cannon, or thrown from an airplane, Asbury was resentful when Hardesty told him that he had ridden there on a tea tray. Hardesty had maintained this with such relieved and convincing hysteria that Asbury dared not question him further.

  For a while they made polite conversation, but at the Narrows, perhaps because of the beauty of the bridge lights in soft dusk and the sudden appearance of the city across the bay, they spoke of what had brought them into one another’s company. Concluding that one should not make or imply a promise and leave it unfulfilled, they wondered nonetheless about the curious net of obligations, failings, coincidences, and events that seem to tie everything together even for those who think they are free. “Apart from natural laws, from the world as we know it,” Hardesty speculated, “maybe there are laws of organization which bind us to patterns that we can’t see and to tasks that we don’t perceive.”

  “I can testify to that directly,” Asbury said. “I made a promise which I didn’t keep, and then years later a wind came up, threw my brother out of the boat, and put me on course. The promise was to go to New York. I’m not surprised. I even picked up a pilot, for free.”

  “You can have my apartment, too,” Hardesty said, because he planned to live with Virginia, if she would have him, forever.

  Asbury accepted, thinking that, the way things were going, to look at the place before he took it would be foolish.

  They glided up to the Morton Street pier, where Hardesty took off like a rabbit. When he arrived at Virginia’s door, he stood outside listening to the sounds from within—water running, the baby trying to speak, a knife on a chopping board, Virginia singing to herself or talking to Martin as if he were able to understand.

  Hardesty went up to the roof and lowered himself onto the adjoining roof of a police stable, where he could look into Virginia’s apartment unobserved. Chinese and Italian boys from neighboring buildings often went there on the pretense of getting some fresh air, but their real purpose was to see Virginia without her clothes. Hardesty sympathized with their desires, and was appropriately severe when he caught them. Now all he wanted was to see her in motion: what she was wearing did not matter. He wanted to see her, and to keep the portrait forever. One day in the future, because he loved her, he would unveil it for her pleasure. Cool night air came from the river and crossed the many rows of tenements. A huge tree, lush with new leaves, sighed and shuddered as Virginia moved about in the bright box of her apartment, every now and then darting in front of a window where Hardesty would catch a glimpse of her. She was sunburnt, and she wore a white dress with a line of violet embroidery around the neckline. Hardesty shifted position, and heard whinnies in the stable below as the horses apprehended his presence. He could now see into the kitchen, and he could hear Virginia reading to Martin as their dinner cooked.

  “‘Here arrived yesterday the ship The Arms of Amsterdam which sailed from New Netherland out of the Mauritius River on September twenty-third,’” she read. She often read to Martin, for she did not want him just to vegetate while she sat in what he would take to be mysterious silence, staring at a paper thing with lines on it, and sometimes turning the page. He was flattered silly when his mother spoke to him as if he understood, and always tried to talk. Since she didn’t want to monopolize the conversation, she would often break her narrative, put down the book, and ask, “What did you think of that, Martin?”

  He usually hesitated as if weighing his thoughts, looked around, and burst out with something like, “Tawiya! Tawiya!” or “Iyama! Iyama!” in a shrill infant gurgle, to which she responded by picking him up, kissing him, and saying, “Yes! Yes! That’s extremely astute of you!” Now he seemed especially agitated, and she wondered why.

  She continued. “‘They report that our people there are of good courage, and live peaceably. Their women, also, have borne children there, and they have bought the isle of Manhattes from the wild men for the value of sixty guilders.’”

  At that, she turned and looked out the window into the summer night. He could see her straight on, though she could not see him. What a sad look she had, and how lovely was her face, framed in her black hair and the fine ring of violet tendrils embroidered on the dress. Suddenly, she bowed her head and covered her eyes with her left hand. Hardesty strained forward in the darkness. She had often told him that she merely wanted to live in the city and see what it would bring. She had often begged him not to seek, but to wait. “Churchmen,” she had said, “like Boissy d’Anglas, burn themselves up in seeking, and they find nothing. If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.”

  The lovely woman in a white dress with violet borders, in a room that gave out beautifully on gardens and the bridge, had become for Hardesty a personification of the city rising. And besides, city or no city, he loved her.

  Before she cried, he would be up the ladder, onto the roof, down the stairs, and at her door. As he left the top of the stable, the horses whinnied again. Clearing the parapet, he saw the city. From this perspective its lights were like summer fires on a grassy plain.

  Remember the soft air, he thought to himself as he crossed the roof. Remember the soft air and all the lights. The lights, never quite the same, always changing, were like distant spirits—those who were forever gone but not forgotten. And perhaps the distant spirits were shining in approval as Hardesty Marratta silently crossed the roof, hesitated to look back at them, and disappeared down the narrow stairway.

  Virginia heard his steps. Somehow, Martin and the horses had already known. She looked up, wondering if it were he. She could hardly breathe. She tilted her head to hear better. Hardesty wondered if she would take him back. “Tawiya! Tawiya!” Martin shrieked as the knocks came on the door, and his mother rushed to open it.

  Hell Gate

  NEARLY EVERY morning from the middle of September to the end of June, Christiana Friebourg emerged from her father’s old hotel and stood on the porch while her eyes adjusted to the light glaring from potato fields and pastures that abutted the sea. Beca
use hurricane waves were sometimes driven over the dunes and across the fields, the hotel was built on rock piers, and thus the porch was a full story and a half high, with a long staircase that connected it to the ground. From this height one could see past the dunes to the ocean, and, to the east, a low forest that covered the sand hills in a band of green. Christiana always stood on the porch for a few moments to look over the sea, the fields, and the forest, to listen to waves and wind, and to say good morning to the light. Then, after hoisting her schoolbag to her shoulders and hitching up her skirt, she would cobble down the stairs and start off in the direction of the northern wood. To get to school, she walked five miles over fields, past the shacks of migrant laborers, and through a forest in which lived deer, rabbits, half a hundred kinds of bird, foxes, weasels, and wild pigs that crashed through the underbrush like soldiers on maneuver.

  A former Marine barracks that perched on a cliff above Gardiner’s Bay, Christiana’s school had half a dozen bare white rooms, into which the north light came unimpeded, glancing off the water, the islands, and a sky that sometimes could hardly be distinguished from the Atlantic itself. Winter and summer, the tops of the windows were crowned with a bright glow. And though the lessons were demanding and time passed quickly, there were intervals in which the children could listen as the whistles of oceangoing ships were bent through distance and mist until they sounded like French horns, or wonder about the composition of the wind, which always managed to push aside the shades and enter their class to speak to them of sunshine and shadow.

  When Christiana was in the second or third grade, her teacher, a young woman as beautiful as Christiana herself was destined to become, asked the students one by one to describe their favorite animal. They were then to write according to their own descriptions a composition illustrative of the dog, the horse, the fish, the bird, or whatever creature they had chosen. Each child rose in turn to discourse upon the object of his affection. No one was surprised when Amy Payson spoke about rabbits, and, without realizing it, rocked one in her arms. A shy little girl who never said anything above a hoarse whisper told a tale of a dog who tried to climb a fence, entrancing her audience if only because they had to listen so closely to make out her barely audible rasp. Everyone was delighted when the fat boy of the class recited spontaneously in verse a five-minute epic about his love for a pig. “My pig it is so big, / Its ears are like silk, / It gives so much milk, / With hope and charity it is thick, / It takes care of us when we are sick, / It produces much leather, / Eats all the heather, / Runs hither and thither, / Wears a quiver,” etc., etc. And he ended it, “Because I love him so much, / that I thrill to his touch.”