Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  The interior was eggshell white, though some walls were shaded in quiet colors or draped with tapestries; and here and there were enormous paintings of active whaling scenes. Looking into them was to be on the sea; the white water seemed so real that one shied away lest one’s face be slapped by the gleaming tail fin of a fighting whale. The ceilings were three times as high as in the modern idiom, and rimmed with moldings skillfully executed by craftsmen who had gone to their rest many generations before. Throughout the building were Oriental carpets, warm woods, brass trim, and subtle recessed lighting that was sometimes focused in to make bright pools, and sometimes drawn back for a palatial wash. The flooring was of oak, the staircases of mahogany. The elevator cages were of brass, teak, and real crystal: they were lifted silently in elevator halls filled with palms and bright spotlights that caught them on the rise and made them sparkle like diamonds.

  In the basement were the power plants; one for the generation of electricity, and one solely for the presses. These were ancient and elaborate constructs of iron, brass, and steel that took up half an acre in a collection of puffing samovars, madly racing wheels, sesquipedalian drive rods in frantic intercourse with capacious cylinders, boilers big enough to cook the entire apricot crop of the Imperial Valley, and a forest of catwalks and ladders to allow access to the valves, levers, tickle pumps, gauges, and dials that made some passersby, who saw the whole apparatus through greenhouselike windows set in a moat of air, think that they were looking at a clock factory or a distillery. When both plants were humming, with their lights shining on the cheerful puffs and tiny plumes of escaping steam, they seemed to be the heart of the world. Busloads of schoolchildren were brought from as far away as Ohio just to stare down at The Sun’s power machinery and the aged mechanics who ran and maintained it. The mechanics alone knew the secrets of the old technology. And even they, who had learned the works from their fathers, did not know the names of half the parts, or what whole inactive appendices were for. Much of the machinery sat in place without being used, and yet all the gears, wheels, and pistons had to be kept polished and oiled.

  Also in the basement were a vault, five squash courts, a seventy-five-foot swimming pool, a gym, saunas, steambaths, and rows of showers.

  The first floor held paper-storage facilities, the presses, truck bays, and a reception hall. The second floor was taken up entirely by linotype and computer composing rooms, and the classified department. Advertising, layout, accounting, personnel, and payroll were on the third floor. The fourth floor was the city room. Instead of horrible metal desks jammed together in an overlit airplane hangar, The Sun’s center of operations was contained in four spacious rectangular rooms arranged around the courtyard, with rows of tables running along their lengths. Affixed to the tables were green glass lamps, and underneath were cabinets, drawers, and the electronic cables that connected each reporter’s desk with the library, the morgue, the composing rooms, and the data banks. In the four corners were pulpitlike rewrite desks from which the various departments received their assignments, and to which a reporter advanced humbly with story in hand, or, if he had a hot potato, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The divisions, each with its own electronic status board, specialized library, data terminals, and director, were as follows: City, National, Washington, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe & the U.S.S.R., the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, Science, Arts, Finance, and Editorial. One entire division was simply designated ad hoc, and was used to pick up the pieces or take up the slack. Unlike most city rooms, The Sun’s was tranquil and well ordered. On one side was a quiet courtyard, and on the other a long view of the city.

  Spiral staircases punched up through the ceiling to the fifth-floor offices of department heads, columnists, editors, and the publisher. Harry Penn’s office, which once had belonged to Isaac, took up half of one of the building’s long sides. It was probably the world’s only indoor harpoon range. Racks of the finest harpoons lined the walls. When someone wanted to practice, he took up one of the lances and stepped into a box that simulated the prow of a rocking whaleboat. Ahead, at thirty feet, wooden representations of whales were towed across the room.

  The sixth floor was the site of the communications, computer, facsimile, meeting, and board rooms. The seventh floor was comprised of common rooms and a restaurant. The eighth and ninth floors housed the library. It had several million volumes in open stacks, all the major newspapers and periodicals either bound or on computer, and a map section. Expert librarians maneuvered a seemingly limitless budget to keep it well maintained and up-to-date. The reference collections were wonders of the world.

  On the roof were a conservatory, a greenhouse, a sundeck, a promenade, and an outdoor café from which one could see the harbor, the bridges, a magnificent cityscape, and sections of open sky bluer than the sky above Montmartre. Here, the flags flew, and here, on summer afternoons and evenings when the paper was working with vigor and grace, a string quartet sometimes played.

  The Sun building was so perfect in execution and so full of energy that, upon looking at it from a distance, one could easily imagine that it was on the verge of coming alive. Just like Isaac Penn’s ships, which gathered in riches from across the seas, The Sun’s writers and reporters had packed it with memories of all the wonders they had seen and assessed. Though the lights were never off, because either The Sun or The Whale was always in the works, it was said that were they to be extinguished there would still be more than enough light by which to see, for 125 years of clarity were impounded in the timbers and arches.

  No less ingenious than the physical quarters of The Sun was its social and economic organization. Perhaps owing to Isaac’s hard days washing pots, the Penns had always believed in a high minimum wage. Their editorial columns persistently inveighed against the idea of welfare for the ablebodied, and government social programs that were little more than elaborate patronage schemes. For this, they were repeatedly condemned in liberal circles. On the other hand, they were just as persistent in advocating what was considered to be a sky-high minimum wage. (They believed that hard and good work deserved its reward, and responded to arguments from conservatives that such a wage would create unemployment and dampen entrepreneurial drive, with the counterargument that the latter could be sustained and would flourish with the concomitant business-tax reductions made possible by greater income equality and a smaller welfare burden.)

  The Penns were not a hundredth as rich as the Binkys, and, whereas the Binkys had accumulated their wealth by grinding people into the ground, the Penns had done nothing of the sort. First, everyone on The Sun, from a kitchen helper who had been there for an hour, to Harry Penn himself, received exactly the same wage and benefit package—exactly. And it was a good one, too, good enough to make any job on the paper a great prize. Every Sun employee enjoyed equal privileges in regard to pension, health care, access to the athletic facilities in the basement, and admission to the café and restaurant. Anyone could take advantage of the generous educational benefits, and throw in music lessons on the side. And yet, there was every reason to work hard and advance within the organization.

  The Sun was patterned after a whaling enterprise. After all expenses were paid out and everyone had his living, the profits were divided according to an elaborate system of shares. No one other than an employee of the paper was entitled to shares, and they were neither inheritable nor transferable. Each employee received five shares upon joining. Thereafter, for every advance he made he received another five, and one share for each year he had worked. There were twenty levels of advancement, and there was seniority. For example, after his first year, a kitchen helper would normally own six shares. After several years on the staff, Hardesty Marratta (who had come in on level eight) had worked his way to level twelve. Thus, with his five original shares, sixty for his work level, and five for the years he had put in, he would have had seventy shares. But he actually had eighty, because he had won two merit awards of five share
s apiece. Harry Penn had been with the paper (starting at age ten as a copy boy) for eighty-five years. He was, naturally, at level twenty. He had five original shares, and, when he was younger and could win awards (for which the editor-in-chief and the publisher were not eligible), he had won ten of them. This left him with 240 shares, quite a lot more than his kitchen helper’s six, but not that many more than Hardesty’s eighty. Were the kitchen helper to stay (as indeed he probably would, for the wages and benefits alone) for ten years, advance two levels to kitchen supervisor, and win an award for his salad, his lentil soup, or, let us say, pulling a baby from the path of Craig Binky’s speeding limousine, he would have a total of thirty shares.

  This system tickled not only ambition, but productivity as well. Since the number of shares was not fixed, and since whatever profit accrued each year was finite (the notion of infinite profit haunted only Craig Binky, who hired economists and sorcerers to see if it was possible), it was to everyone’s advantage to work hard—not only to produce a higher profit, but to hold down the number of jobs and, thus, the number of shares.

  The Sun’s employees wanted to serve it as best they could, not only because doing so was in their interests, but because The Sun was fair—and they could feel this in the same way that they could feel beauty in a landscape. How delightful, too, to know that not only could they feel it, but it could be demonstrated by several systems of logic, and by the way people looked when they came in, morning and evening.

  And The Sun’s remarkably equitable and effective social system originated not in the barrel of a gun, nor in any cruelty, nor in the French Communes, nor with revolutionary violence, nor in the imagination of a reader in the library of the British Museum, but in the nineteenth-century American whaling ship.

  THAT The Sun was not a dull instrument was probably due in large part to its lively and unusual competitor.

  Rupert Binky had once issued a famous challenge to Harry Penn. Boasting on his editorial page and to his friends at the Alabaster Club that The Ghost would extinguish The Sun by the millennium, he claimed that, if it did not, he would attach weighted chains to his body and jump off New York’s highest bridge. “Will Harry Penn attach weighted chains to his body and do the same, if we have succeeded, as we will have by the millennium, in burying The Sun?” he asked in print.

  “No,” Harry Penn had written back on his own editorial page. “And I absolve Rupert Binky of the responsibility to carry out his vow, if only for the sake of the maritime traffic on our rivers. For if Mr. Binky jumps headfirst, we may witness an unwitting demonstration of the wisdom of Billy Mitchell.”

  Soon after, Rupert Binky was killed by an enraged swan on the river Isis in Oxford. A group of Magdalen College oarsmen, weary from a bump race, had heard his last words, which were, “Crush The Sun.” Far from being the mystical and elevated utterance that they thought it was, this was a specific instruction immediately grasped by his grandson, Craig Binky, who then took it upon himself to avenge his grandfather as if the swan had been a trained assassin in the pay of Harry Penn.

  The means at his disposal were most impressive. To begin with, he had the Binky zillions and The Ghost circulation base. But with just those, an attack upon The Sun would have been no more effective than an assault upon its natural counterpart. Though Craig Binky thought that his stratagems were the cause of The Sun’s occasional misfortunes, he was, in fact, assisted by a mammoth presence invisible to him and to many others—the times themselves. Many skills and arts had atrophied, the public was not what it had once been, and most of the population sat immobile for a third or more of its waking hours, absorbing without reaction or resistance whatever they saw on their televisions. Morals and mores had become so rational and progressive that criminals and prostitutes resurrected from another age would have faced neither barriers nor censure. In fact, a criminal such as Peter Lake would have been greatly offended by the dishonesty and corruption of the norm, and disoriented by the general refusal to distinguish between right and wrong. The city had rotted, until the anarchy was such that islands of reconstitution were allowed to thrive within it. These islands steadily grew. Amid waters that were anything but pure, they were like a rising reef, and though they were rising slowly, when the force that carried them finally broke the surface, it would break it all at once.

  The Sun was such an island, threatened by the swollen seas in which Craig Binky swam like a fish—and always with the current. While Harry Penn stood as firm as a rock in the rapids, Craig Binky had a marvelous, easy time flipping about in the foam. He could find ten thousand times more readers for a Ghost article about the newest wet-look roller-dancing costume than Harry Penn could find readers for a Sun essay on colonizing the moon, and The Ghost’s investigation of the aphrodisiacal qualities of crème de caramel created more revenue than the entire Sun series on the brilliant new practitioners of electronic music.

  And yet The Sun thrived. Still, Harry Penn was not content to share The Sun with only its minority of careful and intelligent readers, for he wanted it not just to survive, but to triumph. This had little to do with The Ghost, though admittedly The Ghost was a dreadful irritant: it had to do with his sense of order and his vision of the world. Harry Penn wanted The Sun to fight The Ghost and all it stood for, if never on its own terms, then at least on its own ground. So he marshaled his troops and sent them to fight Craig Binky. Because they would not use Ghost methods or cater to broken tastes, they fought at a continual disadvantage. But the disparity fired their imaginations.

  Although The Sun was the model of accuracy and formality in its news pages, its editorial section covered a wider spectrum, and was divided up like a parliament into warring factions. Editorial I was a page devoted to sober, dignified, and eclectic assessments not unlike those of editorial pages in other great newspapers around the world, except that you were less likely to know what The Sun would say, because its politics were so fluid, practical, and idiosyncratic. In Editorial II, the Right was allowed a full page to present, often admirably and brilliantly, its completely predictable line. So with Editorial III, a full page for the Left. Editorial IV, however, was controversial, for in it The Sun columnists and guests were encouraged to write without regard to libel or any other consequences, though by some sort of unwritten code abusiveness and sensationalism were filtered from articles that might otherwise have been vitriolic or provocatory. In writing for Editorial IV, in fact, Virginia Gamely, now Marratta, began to push her luck.

  She started out gently, but was soon caught up in a compulsion the origins of which she did not understand. This was not a surprising pattern, for in Lake of the Coheeries the biggest blizzards, the ones that covered the houses and made the countryside like a rolling white sea, always started with small tentative flurries that were nearly invisible. At first, Virginia’s columns went largely unnoticed, for they were appreciations of a city that loomed so fiercely in the eyes of its inhabitants that they were seldom able to apprehend it as a whole. The irony of its beauty was that they, who made it, could not see it. They were too busy rushing and fighting, lost within it like mites.

  Virginia often accompanied Hardesty and Marko Chestnut on their long walks in search of forgotten architecture and revelatory views. When they found a subject, she would wander off to the side, to a scrub-covered lot or a flight of stone stairs, and watch them work. While they sketched and made notes, she would fix her gaze upon a scene, either the one they had chosen or one close by. For example, she might watch the afternoon light against a carved façade of reddish stone, and see that the light and the stone were in love, and that they moved back and forth in sympathy like two sea fans in the same transparent current. She could hear in the traffic a white sound that threw veils across the present and allowed her to hold the scene to her the way that she held her own children—fighting time, conquered by it, ravished by it. For she believed that only through love can one feel the terrible pain of time, and then make it completely still. She followed the sway
of reeds in windy, broken, summer lots, until they swayed no more and she saw them motionless and within a stopped frame. And then she would walk back to The Sun and write essays that drove Craig Binky and his readers crazy, because Virginia saw the world not as a system of material blocks in which one thing was connected to another, but, rather, as a magnificent illusion of the spirit. In one essay she wrote about the dome of the old police headquarters and how it managed to “watch the city by means of its shape, for,” she wrote, “apart from the inexplicable magic of color, images are transmitted and received in terms of shape. The receptors themselves are of a recognizable, constant form that is derived from the attributes of light. After all, what we see of the eye is itself a dome.” In these speculations, she explained the quality of the air in the morning light. And she went on from there, in a vein that was simultaneously metaphysical and sensual, to talk about ultimate purpose, symmetry, beauty, God, the devil, balance, justice, and time. This was a Coheeries trait. They were always very serious up there, and in matters of nature and religion they could talk wallpaper off the wall, with the patience and intensity of nineteenth-century German philosophers.

  When Harry Penn read the first of these essays, he called Virginia into his office.

  “Do you realize,” he asked right off the bat, “that because of these essays The Sun will be viciously attacked?”