Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  The Ermine Mayor looked at Praeger and, for the first time, did not like what he saw. Before him was a rangy six-footer with a fighter’s gleam in his eyes, and a face that was held combatively tense—the way some hard cases get when they’re mad, squinting as if in preparation for taking punishment.

  “Where were you born?” the mayor asked, positive that Praeger did not have the streets in his blood, and could never call the city his own, could never assert in front of a crowd the special pride and sureness that comes from being born in the place. He had all the marks of an immigrant from the suburbs.

  “I was born on Havemeyer Street, your honor,” Praeger said, “almost directly beneath the Brooklyn ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge. How do you like that apple?”

  “I couldn’t care less,” answered the Ermine Mayor, returning to his papers as a signal for Praeger to leave. “You’re not running for anything.”

  BY THE middle of July, much of the ardor in the matter of the colossal platform that floated in the Hudson had disappeared. The mayor was as quiet as a slab of granite, no one came from or went to the ship, and uniformed men appeared on its decks only when someone attempted to board it. At first galvanized by the challenge, the press employed every kind of stratagem to figure out what the ship held. A dozen journalist-parachutists had drifted down onto its massive two-acre hatches, only to be apprehended on each occasion and escorted to shore by mute guards. Frogmen swam about the hull and climbed the side with magnets and suction cups, and were met at the railings by the same humorless guards. Helicopters, seaplanes, balloons, floating duck blinds—everything that could move across water or air was attracted to the ship during its first weeks in New York. It was scanned by infraredometers, magnetometers, and subatomic particles, but for deducing its contents the only valid calculation was one which, in comparing the ship’s volume and displacement, determined its exact average density, including whatever was in it. This revealed nothing, since no one knew how tightly the holds were packed. The fires of the press soon died down, and were just as quickly rekindled in response to other events. Television had chopped the world into tiny bits, and what had once been the gaping maw of popular interest had evolved into a hair-thin pipette through which the ship in the Hudson was simply too big to pass.

  After returning from a frenetic search of most of the Finger Lakes, Craig Binky made sure that he outdid his rivals in trying to unravel the mystery. He, Binky, a child of the Enlightenment, commissioned most of the advanced scientific studies, going so far as to have a particle accelerator built in the west Village, and its target apparatus installed across the river, so that what he called “bideo beams” could pass through the ship and draw a picture of its innards. But it didn’t work—the bulkheads were impenetrable even to gamma rays—and Craig Binky, ever aware of the public’s thrashing insomnias, pointed The Ghost in other directions. He himself was swept up by the poetry vogue of the second week of July. (Those lucky poets whose books were published that weekend became millionaires.)

  It took Harry Penn much longer than Craig Binky to drop the story, but he did. The Sun staff was surprised, for it seemed out of character, but he told them to accept defeat, temporarily, and await a turn in events. Banner headlines soon devolved into tiny paragraphs on the back page. The ship vanished from the editorials and did not even appear in “Shipping and Mails,” since it was not tied to a pier.

  So forgotten, it became a part of the landscape, a third palisade, the kind of thing that people look at and do not see—which is to say that it became a part of the city. Peter Lake took time off from his machinery to view it, but it meant no more to him than to anyone else.

  Only Praeger, Hardesty, and Virginia refused to let the matter drop, because Harry Penn had not merely advised them to wait for a turn of events, he had ordered them to discontinue work on the story. It was the first time he had ever restrained Virginia, and Praeger would have resigned had he not loved the old man as much as he did.

  After many nights in the library trying to discover where the ship had been constructed (there seemed to be no building ways in the world big enough to accommodate it), Hardesty was so exhausted that he fell asleep at a reference table and dreamed that he was in San Francisco, in his father’s house, looking over the bay. When he was a boy, he had liked to watch the brick-red tugboats, compressed in the clean bright ring of his telescope, as they pushed a carpet of rolling white water before them. On the stacks were a gilt figure of the rampant lion of San Marco, and the name Marratta. It always sent a chill down his spine to see these boats charging across the bay, with his name written on them in the color of a golden lion—not so much because he was proud, but because they reminded him of his father’s steadfastness and strength.

  When he awoke, he saw Virginia bent over a thick maritime register. “We’re not going to find anything here,” he said as Praeger emerged from the darkness loaded down with half a dozen shipping tomes. “Why don’t we just watch the ship. Asbury can take us over to the Jersey side, and pick us up before dawn. Now that they’re off the front page, they may loosen up a little and give something away.”

  Every evening after dark, for the next ten days, they went over to the Palisades, where they found a broad ledge halfway up a cliff, and kept the ship under surveillance all through the night—taking turns sleeping and watching. Asbury picked them up just before dawn. They saw nothing. Though Hardesty had suggested that they follow this course, he was the first to want to abandon it. But Praeger wouldn’t let him. Long after Hardesty and Virginia had lost any hope of seeing anything, Praeger had bright eyes for the deserted decks, and when he was awakened for his shift he always looked like a hunter anticipating a kill. They kept at it into August, when the river was like a warm bath and mists and steam circled all about the ship.

  And one day, not surprisingly, it was Praeger who electrified them with a call to awake. The mist had vanished, and they opened their eyes to see Manhattan outlined against the pure colors of a clear dawn. On the opposite shore, in the shadows of the canyons, a signal light was flashing. Had they been ten feet to the left or right of where they were, they would not have been able to see its blinkered sparking. But they were directly opposite the ship’s bridge, and the message had overshot its target. With binoculars, Praeger could see that two figures stood by a long black car on a pier across the river. One operated the light, while the other paced about. The pacer was short and fat; the signaler was in some sort of uniform.

  “Let me see,” Hardesty demanded.

  “No. Wait a minute,” said Praeger. “Asbury’s coming up along this bank of the river. If we’re fast enough, we might be able to catch them in whatever they’re about to do.”

  They scrambled in the half-light and reached the base of the cliff as Asbury pulled in. He was surprised, since he usually had to climb to their post. According to him, their situation was difficult. If a boat were to emerge from one of the ship’s water-level bays and strike out for the pier, they would get to the other side too late to follow whoever emerged from it. On the other hand, running the river in anticipation of this would scare off their quarry.

  They were lucky, however, because a small tanker was heading upriver from the open harbor. They let it come up even, and then moved along with it, hidden from view. Half a mile north, the tanker followed the channel to the east side of the river, and as it did they pulled forward of it and were sheltered on the starboard all the way to a long pier behind which they vanished completely out of sight of either ship or the pier on which the limousine was still waiting.

  After they climbed a mass of rotten pilings, they ran toward the street to search for a taxi. Hardesty was in the middle of thinking that they would never find a taxi at dawn on Twelfth Avenue, when he looked into the pier shed alongside which Virginia and Praeger were still running, and saw five hundred taxis starting their engines. He didn’t even have to say anything, and several empty dozen of them arrived in a gleaming phalanx.

  Headi
ng downtown toward the pier where the light had been flashing, they passed the limousine, going in the opposite direction.

  “Turn around unobtrusively,” Praeger instructed their driver.

  “What does that mean?” the driver asked, veering a hundred and eighty degrees in a blaze of burning rubber.

  “Nothing,” Praeger replied. “Just follow that limousine without him knowing.”

  The limousine cut a devious trail, going in circles, passing the same place three or four times, careering through the park, and insinuating itself as often as it could in whatever traffic it encountered at that early hour. After its tour of Manhattan, it stopped in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three men got out. They entered the museum via a little-used door embedded in the base of a huge plinth.

  As Praeger and the Marrattas sped by in the taxi, they saw the three men from the limousine quite clearly. One was extremely tall, another was the fat figure who had been pacing, and the other was the signaler. The fat one was an adolescent. Even from a distance, in a moving taxi, trying to look askance with nonchalance, they were able to see that his face was so fat it made his eyes into squinting, smiling slits. At first they had thought that, since the signaler had been in a uniform of some type, he was dressed in livery and had been driving. However, as he vanished into the museum they saw that he was not a chauffeur, but, rather, a man of the cloth.

  Had Peter Lake seen these people all together he probably would have lit up like an electric eel, because they were Jackson Mead, the Very Reverend Mootfowl, and Cecil Mature—who had long ago changed his name to Mr. Cecil Wooley, and who had come in advance of the other two, posing as a street vendor who worked the area near the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Hardesty, Virginia, and Praeger paid the taxi a small fortune, and repaired to the sidewalk café across the street from the museum to sit on its unoccupied veranda and wait for the three odd people who had gone in, to come out. While they were waiting, well concealed, another limousine pulled up, and out jumped the Ermine Mayor, known for his bald head and springy step.

  “Mighta known,” said Praeger.

  Then another limousine pulled up.

  “There are an awful lot of limousines around here,” Hardesty said. “You’d think this was the Upper East Side.”

  Its door opened slowly. A cane poked out, then a foot—obviously an old foot. Then a pant leg of houndstooth. Then all the rest of the diminutive, aged, and spry—Harry Penn.

  A LONG time before, Harry Penn had been embarrassed and shamed almost to death, and had rolled in agony across the accommodating expanse of Isaac Penn’s capacious dinner table, when his carefully hidden pictures of husky seminude maidens of the evening had broken through the ceiling and drifted down into the dining room like overdue mail. Nearly a century later, he still turned a bright color in recollection of the moment when the postcards had fallen onto the serving platters, and his father had actually caught some in midair. If there were such a thing as archaeologists of the soul, they might reconstruct all that has gone before from shame and love, two everlasting columns that rise into time though everything else is worn away. For Harry Penn, the sting of that moment was still dreadfully hot, despite the fact that over the years it had been joined by a dozen others—fewer and fewer, it is true, as he grew older and more adept. Yet, now another was added to the pack, suddenly to envelop him when he least expected it. As he came out of the museum, at a little after eight in the morning, he found Praeger de Pinto, Hardesty Marratta, and Virginia Gamely (who was still known by her maiden name) standing between the limousines. He had misled and lied to them, and excluded them from important things. Hardly able to look at these people that he knew so well, he entered his car like a slope-shouldered dog. He was not used to feeling that way.

  Jackson Mead glared in their direction with the not inconsequential power of his very steely, very blue eyes. He seemed to be eight feet tall (he nearly was), and almost to glow—as if everything about him were pure, and he were not a man. In stark contrast was the semifunereal Mootfowl, who looked like a nineteenth-century missionary trying his best not to enjoy the South Seas. Though he was Lincolnesque and grave, it was easy to think that any hand that touched him would forever remain tainted with the supernatural. Complementing the white glow and the dark streak, was a fat ball—Cecil Mature. Whereas Jackson Mead was angry, and Mootfowl looked amused and wise, Cecil Mature (or Mr. Cecil Wooley, as he insisted) was a one-man mob of unrestrained affection. Virginia felt like kissing his big smiling face, and Hardesty and Praeger were tempted to embrace him with one arm and smile back as if for a photograph.

  These three were so strange that Praeger, normally the model of self-possession, spread his arms with outwardly facing palms and asked, in amazement, “Who are you? And where do you come from?”

  Jackson Mead seemed to think that this was a reasonable question, and he answered it. “From St. Louis, and beyond, and other places,” he said.

  Then the mayor came out, and all the cars started their engines and drove off, leaving Jackson Mead’s answer to hang in the air like a cloud of diesel exhaust: “From St. Louis, and beyond, and other places.” Even though he was no longer saying it, they kept hearing it.

  “WHO IS it?” screamed Boonya, from beyond the heavy door.

  “Praeger de Pinto.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Praeger de Pinto.”

  “Who? Praeger de who?”

  “Praeger . . . de . . . Pinto!”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “We don’t want none.”

  “None of what?”

  “Whatever.”

  “This is Praeger de Pinto!”

  “Who?”

  “Open the door, Boonya. You know who it is.”

  “Let a minute pass. Cool off.” Five minutes later, she opened the door. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I would like to see Mr. Penn.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Yes he is.”

  “No he ain’t.”

  “Yes he is.”

  “No he ain’t.”

  “I know he is.”

  “All right. He is. But he’s in the bath. You can’t see him.”

  “Why? Does he become invisible in water?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why can’t I see him—hello, Christiana,” he said, as Christiana came down the back stairs, carrying a tray of sugar cookies with jam blobs. “I’m a man. He’s a man.”

  “He never sees anyone in his bath. It is outrageous.”

  “That’s okay,” Praeger said, heading for the stairs. “I am outrageous.”

  Harry Penn was sitting under a fall of sun-heated water that cascaded over his shoulders into a ten-by-ten, eight-foot-deep, slate bathtub. It was hard for him to speak over the noise of the water, so he adjusted a droplet-covered brass lever, and then invited Praeger to enter the room. He hadn’t known for sure that it had been Praeger knocking at the door, but he suspected as much, because indignant people always rap on doors, like woodpeckers in their prime. “I thought you might be coming,” he said. “I suppose that I retreated to the bath almost to hide.”

  “I imagine that’s possible,” said Praeger, humbled by the frail and naked body that he had never seen except in tweedy suits. The shock of seeing how thin and slight a man becomes in his late nineties reminded Praeger that, no matter what happened, he would have to be respectful.

  “Sit down, Praeger,” Harry Penn instructed, pointing at a towel-covered cedar bench. “I was intending to tell you all this when the time was right. I still can’t say much, but I’ll explain as best I can. I owe that to you.

  “When you get to be as old as I am, Praeger, you have long finished with ambition—that is, for yourself. Oh, I admit, there is a species of beast that punches and kicks until the coffin’s nailed, but you take the average man as he approaches a hundred, and you’ll see that he’s pretty calm, interested mainly in mem
ory, his children and grandchildren, small pleasures and graces, and very abstract things like the public weal, kindness, or courage—things that, from a perspective of serenity, are as visible and real as anything else.

  “I knew in my late teens that all my life would be never-ending revisions and revisions yet again, of that which many times over I thought I knew, and did not, and still don’t. But the light grows deeper. And you rise higher and higher, until, close to death, you view the history of your life as if an angel is describing it to you from an elevated platform on a cloud.

  “It would be hard for you to understand, because you are so young, the abiding love and affection that I have for young people and their passions. I suppose one learns this, or begins to learn it, in bringing up children, and it is one of life’s great surprises—looking back to see those who have come after you struggling through what you have nearly finished.

  “Normally I would sacrifice a great deal rather than put obstructions in the way of a young man like you. I never have, have I?”

  Praeger shook his head to confirm that Harry Penn hadn’t.

  “No. It was quite deliberate. I try to do my best for you all. So, then, why suddenly have I become secretive and misleading? Why has the horse in the pasture begun to run with the foxes? I’ll tell you.” He laughed. “I can’t tell you!”

  Praeger began to pace back and forth on the slippery ledge at the side of the pool. “For several weeks this June I wrote editorials condemning the mayor for his secrecy in this matter,” he said, “calling in behalf of The Sun for public disclosure. And all the time that I was doing this, you knew.”

  “No, I didn’t. I met Mead for the first time today.”

  Praeger froze like a hunting dog who catches a scent. “Mead? Who’s that, the big one?”

  “Yes. I shouldn’t have told you. But it hardly matters. His name is Jackson Mead. The cleric is called Mootfowl.”