Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  It was still broad daylight when the girl doctor appeared. Her patient was sitting up in bed, freshly awakened, pensive, and obviously much improved. When they are absorbed in thought, certain people become so paralyzed by the play (or circus) that takes place invisibly before their eyes or in their hearts, that they command a silence that others give them without resentment. Peter Lake had not always been like this, but now he was, perhaps because he needed so badly to solve the riddle into which he had awakened. Even his physician was silent out of respect for his reverie.

  “Oh,” he said when he saw her. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I am,” she answered.

  “I never heard of a girl doctor.”

  “I’m twenty-seven.”

  “You don’t look it. You look at best fifteen—forgive me—and, still, I didn’t know that they made women doctors. Then again, that doesn’t mean very much, does it, seeing that I don’t even know who I am.”

  “While I was gone,” she said, “I checked to be absolutely sure that there were female doctors in Ireland. There are.”

  “I’m not from Ireland,” he said. “I’m from New York.”

  “You speak with an Irish accent.”

  “That’s true, and it’s a mystery to me. But I’m from the city. I know that.”

  “You were found in the harbor. You could have been a sailor or a passenger on a ship. Knocked on the head and all that.”

  “No,” Peter Lake asserted. “I wouldn’t be so certain except for the police horses. That was about twenty minutes ago. They must have been on their way downtown to break the shift. Where are we now?”

  “St. Vincent’s Hospital.”

  “That’s on Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street.”

  “Yes.”

  “It would take about ten minutes for them to get from here to the stables, and ten minutes to get in. Therefore, it must be about four o’clock.”

  Just then, as if to confirm that here was a man of precision, who would and could find his way out of the confusion that had temporarily overcome him, a church bell chimed. He counted silently, moving his lips, “One . . . two . . . three . . . four.” The doctor looked at her watch. (He didn’t understand that she was touching it to cue it, and he thought she was petting it the way a railway man does with his chronometer, or a baseball pitcher does with his hat.) It was exactly four.

  “That’s an unusual way to tell time,” she told him. “By horses! It certainly shows that there’s a good chance for you to find out who you are, if only by deduction.”

  “I don’t need a watch,” Peter Lake volunteered. “I can tell the quarter-hours by the bells, and (here, he wanted to orient himself and to impress her at the same time) I know that trains will pass by on the El approximately once every . . .”

  “What El?” she interrupted.

  “The El.”

  “What El?”

  “The Sixth Avenue El.”

  A shiver went up her spine.

  “The elevated train,” he said, his voice rising. “I couldn’t be more positive.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no elevated train on Sixth Avenue, or anywhere else that I know of. Oh, maybe in the Bronx, or Brooklyn somewhere. But not in downtown Manhattan.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Peter Lake, sure of himself, yet not sure at all. “They’re all over the place. You can’t miss ’em. They’re everywhere.”

  “No,” she stated emphatically. “They’re nowhere. There aren’t any.”

  “Let me take a look out the window.”

  “You’re tied into an IV and monitors, and besides, we’re on the side street.”

  “I’ve got to see.”

  “Trust me. There hasn’t been an El for half a century.”

  “That’s why I’ve got to see,” he said, starting to move. “I’ve got to see the city. It’s the only thing by which to really measure the time.”

  “How about your horses?” she asked, sympathetically.

  “Horses aren’t enough. They’re too small. You understand? I need the whole city.”

  “When you recover.”

  “I am recovered.”

  “Not quite yet.”

  “I am,” he echoed. He pulled the hospital gown from his shoulders. She went to stop him, but when she saw where his wounds had been, she saw only scars. The man was sound, and in trim as well. He had no business in a needed hospital bed.

  She put her hands to her mouth. It was not possible. She herself had dressed the wounds, and she knew his condition exactly. She tried to think of ways in which she could have been fooled. Perhaps it was an elaborate practical joke. No, he was well. Inexplicably, he was well.

  “What year is this?” he demanded.

  She told him, but he was not ready to believe her until he himself had seen the city, fine and irrefutable clock that it was.

  “Show me to the roof,” he said.

  She helped him disconnect the tubes and sensors, and he got into the clothes that he had been given on the ferry. They walked quietly through the ward and went to the elevator. It would be dark out, but what did that matter in New York?

  From the way that he stared at the stainless steel, the thermal call buttons, and the lights, she knew that he had never seen such things before in his life. She observed, as a physician would, that he was trembling, that his lips were slightly quivering, that his complexion alternated between flush and pallor. And then, as perhaps a physician would not, she observed that she, too, was trembling. “If this is a joke, I’ll kill you,” she said, wondering how she could believe what she believed and think what she had thought.

  They came to the top floor, which was empty and white. The old building had been redone, but it was familiar enough to make Peter Lake think that he was about to see the city that he knew. The El would be there, as would everything else. Ferries with rows of black smokestacks as tall as top hats would drift across the bay, spitting out sparks as big as oranges. He would see distant girderwork against the sky, but, overall, the city would be the same—the nineteenth century opening its eyes, casting off its veils of steel and ebony. The dream would end. It would all fall quietly into place.

  They came to the roof door. “It’s funny,” Peter Lake stated. “I don’t think that this notion I have could be so, but I’m afraid to open the door.”

  “Just push it,” she said.

  He did.

  The Sun . . .

  ON THE fifteenth of May, The Sun celebrated its 125th anniversary, and several thousand people embarked upon the Staten Island ferry as it rested in the harbor in a cool fog that drifted across the surface of the water. Harry Penn had decided to celebrate the longevity of his newspapers by taking his employees and their spouses on a spring cruise “up the Hudson and under the Palisades,” as it was originally billed, although the phrase “under the Palisades” made Hugh Close, the rewrite editor, protest sarcastically that they weren’t going to do any tunneling in rock. The cruise was then to take place “beneath the Palisades,” after “in the shadow of the Palisades” was rejected because, as Close pointed out, there would be no moon that night, and, therefore, the Jersey cliffs would cast no shadows.

  The brightly lighted ferry was as orange and gold as a bowl of fruit in the sun. Thousands of bottles of champagne and tons of hors d’oeuvres and desserts filled linen-covered tables that ran like ribbons through the long cabins. An orchestra on each deck played at full steam as the celebrants came on board. They were elated and optimistic, because they had put The Sun to bed early that afternoon and received surprise 125th anniversary grants equivalent to a full year’s salary, and letters of praise and thanks from Harry Penn, singling out their heroic, constructive, or generous acts, assuring them of the paper’s fiscal health, and inviting them to stay on and share in its future.

  For Hardesty and Virginia, the 125th anniversary grant was quite a windfall, since it meant that their household would receive that year four fully adequate sala
ries. In addition, the Harvesters and Planters Bank of St. Louis, after five years, had recovered, recapitalized, and sent Hardesty a letter promising to honor his long-dormant check. Altogether, they felt very comfortable. Virginia had had her second child, a girl whom they named Abby. Mrs. Gamely had gotten a letter through, inviting them to visit as soon as they could, and reporting that, in these years just before the millennium Lake of the Coheeries had had hard winters—yes—but also extraordinary summers which had made the village overflow with natural wealth, “in the agrarian and lexicographical senses of the word. There is so much food, everywhere,” her friend had written for her, “and so many new and wonderful words being generated, that the storehouses and closets are overflowing. We are tubflooded with neologisms, smoked fish, and fruit pies.” She had even enclosed in the letter itself a very thin and very delicious cherry pie.

  Hardesty and Virginia began to dance to the concert waltzes even before the ferry pulled out into the harbor, and were among the happiest of the happy couples. Their children were at home, safe, sleepy, and content; they were solvent and advancing; they were in perfect health; and they had just finished a hard day’s work. This, plus the few glasses of champagne (which was so dry that, if spilled, it vanished) made them waltz in perfect ellipses and dips. At times they orbited Asbury and Christiana, who were especially striking in their youth and vitality, and just as happy. With extraordinary ease, they danced across the ferry’s transformed deck, moving like the planets. They passed Praeger de Pinto, who danced with Jessica Penn. They interwove with workers and staff—the pressmen and the truckers, the mechanics with their long noble faces and carefully clipped turn-of-the-century mustaches, lovely young secretaries who had never been to such an elegant affair save for the very sedate and civilized Christmas and July parties held in The Sun’s roof garden, the cubs who had just joined the paper and who were as awkward and overly grave as adolescents, the ancient librarians, the cooks, the guards (in their absence, the police were watching the empty Sun building), and Harry Penn himself: wizened, dapper, sagacious, spry, and as thin as a lightning rod. When everyone was on board, the ferry moved out onto the Upper Bay and turned north into the Hudson, which was as smooth as oil. They glided past the deep inner-glowing buildings, and except for the muted orchestras and engines, the ferry was silent. From Manhattan’s streets and highways a singing sound arose. Mist obscured stars and sky, and as they approached the George Washington Bridge, the mist descended to curtain both banks of the river, though not the bridge itself, or its catenary, which sparkled with blue and white diamonds and looked wide enough and broad enough to cradle the world in its curve.

  Manhattan’s glass walls, running in a smooth green glow down the Hudson to the Battery, were as nothing compared to the white curtain that marked the conflict of the seasons. Its chill and purity upon the glassy river put the ferry on a stage. Soon the celebrants were no longer celebrating. Cathedral walls had been raised about them, and their quiet drifting was like a journey to the world of the dead—all of which suggested that, perhaps, beyond the whitened curtains of mist, was something far more momentous than New Jersey. And it was suddenly quite cold—a message from far beyond the chain of lights that marked the Hudson’s northern turn.

  The orchestras stopped the concert waltzes and the engines were stepped down, until the gliding ferry silently held its breath. Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him. The orchestra in the stern soon followed, and the canon swelled throughout the decks and across the water until the ferry seemed like a musical instrument, a thing of delicate glass that shone from within and floated upon the same mirror as the city itself.

  As the music drifted into the ether, they stood at the rails and on the upper decks, staring outward, away from themselves, transfixed. They had come aboard the ferry without a care, to dance and laugh. Then a white sash had been drawn around them, and they had realized how quick and insubstantial were their lives, how, in a second, in the blink of an eye, all is lost. This brought them far from their worries and ambitions, and, caring only for the music and the laws of which it was part, they stood upon the ferry’s open decks and were deeply moved. Whatever would come, would come. Whatever they would see, they would see. And they would be thankful to have seen it.

  How brave they are, thought Harry Penn, who had known such moments at the height of war, on the sea, and in looking into children’s eyes. How brave they are to see straight through to their own deaths, and how well they will be rewarded.

  Visiting from the summer that was on its way, sheets and chains of silent heat-lightning struck the billowing mist, and the shattering of its tributaries was mirrored in the river. This sight stopped the orchestras and silenced the music as the ferry and its passengers glided under the soundless flashes that were battling above. And then, just below the sparkling bridge, the ferry made a silent breathless turn and started for home.

  ISAAC PENN had left Hudson, New York, on a whaling ship when he was eleven years old and as skinny as a thread. Never having seen the sea, he was quite astonished when, as they tacked downriver, they came upon the open miles of Haverstraw Bay, and then the broad expanse of the Tappan Zee. As they sailed past Manhattan and the Palisades, the rows of buildings, the distraught wharves, and the thicket of masts tighter and webbier than raspberry bushes near the Lake of the Coheeries impressed him deeply and forever. He took it all in as best he could, and vowed to return to Manhattan someday to participate in the rise of a city that even he, an eleven-year-old whaler boy, could easily see was on an unshakable northward march up the island. His vow was set into steel when he perceived what was beyond the Narrows. Here were no rolling green hills spotted with mobile-jawed, gaudy-colored cows; no reedy bays choked with white herons and swans; no blue mountains in the distance; and no cool and windy evergreen forests along the ridges, but just the sea, and nothing else, in a great circle of water and sky. The whalers then put him to work washing pots—for three years.

  He went to sea again and again. Each time, they tacked down the Hudson and passed Manhattan, and, each time, Manhattan had bounded north by several leaps. Isaac Penn was just as steady. He went from galley boy to cabin boy, to apprentice seaman, to able-bodied seaman, to third, second, and first mate, to captain, to shipowner, to owner of a fleet. Just before whaling collapsed, he withdrew his fortune and put it into merchant vessels, manufacturing, land, and a newspaper of his own design.

  He knew how to run a tight ship, the best way to treat a crew, the means to navigate through darkness and storms, how to find elusive and valuable whales, and the trick of writing in the log all the news of the day both clearly and economically. He knew how to keep perfect accounts, how to arrange efficiently the plan of the decks, and when to sell his oil. He had placed correspondents in foreign ports to send back news of other fleets, to prepare him for the fluctuations of the market. He had patience—he could pursue good fortune relentlessly, or wait for it to come within reach—and he himself had driven not a few well-placed harpoons.

  Thus he was able to design The Sun to be, if not a perfect instrument, then something rather close. On Printing House Square in lower Manhattan, at the quadripartite junction of Dark Willow, Breasted, Tillinghast, and Pine streets, it had been placed near the center of government, for the political news; the wharves, for the collection of foreign dispatches; the Five Points, for crime; the Bowery, for theater and music; and Brooklyn (via the ferry, until they finished the bridge), for human interest. “In those days,” Harry Penn was fond of saying, “they thought that the only human interest was in Brooklyn. ‘We need a human interest story,’ someone would say. ‘Get a kid and send him to Brooklyn.’ I used to point out that there were human beings in Manhattan, too. They didn’t really believe me. Off I would go to Brooklyn, searching desperately for a human interest story, which, more often tha
n not, would be about a cow.”

  Though the downtown location became slightly disadvantageous in view of all that later occurred in midtown, it permitted many of the staff to live on Staten Island and in Brooklyn Heights, and it encouraged a sense of history and activity, because it was the center of a great old hive.

  Even from afar, one could distinguish The Sun from those buildings that surrounded, and, over time, nearly overwhelmed it. The Sun was always recognizable because of its flags. These were not like the chorus lines of national underwear hung out to dry in front of the United Nations or around the skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza, but, rather, individual beacons of flamelike color. Five enormous flags played on the wind. In the four corners were the banners of New York the city, New York the state, The Sun, and The Whale, and in the center was the American flag. The Sun’s flag was a brassy gold sun with a corona of sharp triangles, set on a white satiny field. The Whale’s flag was half light blue and half navy, scalloped by waves to divide the sea from the sky, with a huge whale resting motionless above the water and flipping his tail in articulated strokes of blue, white, and gray. In the rare case of a demonstrably just and unjust war, in which one side was purely the aggressor and the other merely a victim, the victim’s standard would fly underneath the national flag. Banners decorated the inner courtyard and were hung like tapestries in the city room because Harry Penn held that these were to a building what a tie and a scarf are to a man and a woman. “A good tie can make an old gray bastard like me look like the king of Polynesia,” he would say. “I love to wear a nice tie, and so does the building.”

  The building itself was an iron-framed, stone-faced, French, neoclassical rectangle by the nineteenth-century architect Oiseau. It was light on its feet and spacious, and yet it was substantial. It had been completely refurbished 110 years after its completion, and now the huge window frames were filled with rimless smoke-colored glass that looked like large flat gemstones in classical foils. At the heart of the building was a large courtyard with gardens and a fountain. On the four walls of the courtyard, lighted stairways were hung over the open space. A conservatory shell of glass and steel covered this atrium, and in the warmer seasons was cranked open like a cargo hatch and folded conveniently out of the way.