Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “Yes, but the one supposedly murdered the other a hundred years ago. Mr. Cecil Wooley is no more than twenty, and Mootfowl is certainly less than fifty. What, exactly, are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that it sends a chill up my spine.”

  “Was the murder reported?”

  “Neither the papers nor the police have any record of it. The city was in the midst of gang wars, and individual murders didn’t get much play.”

  “When did they ever?” asked Hardesty.

  They locked their bicycles to a fence, and crossed through the tubes to the New Jersey side of the Hudson, where railyards moribund for half a century were suddenly springing to life. Though it was Saturday, automated machinery, robots, and a thousand construction workers flooded the yard, and yellow hardhats were as much in abundance as the dandelions that grew between the ties. For as far as the eye could see, ranks of freight trains were drawn into orderly rows. Long flatcars held bulldozers, cranes, and parts of disassembled construction machines that were bigger than a house.

  “What’s the purpose of all this?” Praeger asked a bearded workman. “These yards have been abandoned for years.”

  “Two new lines coming in,” the worker said above the din of track-laying machines and pile drivers. “. . . be finished in about a week.”

  “Railway lines?” Praeger asked incredulously, since no railways had been built for decades.

  “Railway lines—one from the northwest, Pennsylvania. And one from the west, from who the hell knows where.”

  “What’s that?” Hardesty asked, pointing to a fenced area in which half a dozen ruined buildings leaned, one against another.

  “I don’t know,” the workman answered, looking from behind sunglasses that reflected the dazzling autumn light. “It’s supposed to be a loading dock, but a lot of these guys,” he said, meaning the other workers, “won’t touch it. So it looks like it’s never going to be a loading dock, even though the plans call for a concrete platform right in the middle.”

  “Why won’t they touch it?” Praeger asked.

  “They’re nuts, that’s why. They say it’s a holy place. You always get guys like that on a construction site. Construction is special. I can’t explain it, and I have to get back to work. But, believe me. It happens.”

  Hardesty and Praeger stood aside to watch the work. The yards had long been dead, but now it seemed as if they had merely been biding their time. Rusted and disheveled track, rotten ties stacked like corpses, flapping tin-skinned buildings, and splintered piers that smelled of pitch were rapidly becoming forests of gleaming rails, new platforms, solid towers, and switches and signals that covered the plain of cinders as if they had grown there like crops.

  Because Hardesty and Praeger were hungry, they decided to walk to the Broth House. To do this they had to climb over fifty fences and a dozen parked freight trains. Soot and dirt from the fences and boxcar ladders covered their hands, and when they wiped the sweat off their faces, the soot ran down their temples. They were chased by fierce watchdogs running loose in the freight yards, and at one point Praeger was trapped on a signal tower by a wolflike dog who seemed to be barking “Vengeance is mine.”

  When they arrived at the Broth House their cheeks were red with cold and exercise, their clothes were filthy and torn, they were pleasantly tired, and they fit right in with the laborers and sailors who were there, milling in tough, crazy, senseless circles, threatening everyone around them with their eyes, staying upright and untouched in a play of evasion and maneuver that was as close as one could get, without getting wet, to swimming in high surf. “Praeger,” Hardesty declared, “these are the same people who drive their cars into guard rails. You know, the ones who rob a jewelry store, make a clean getaway, and then pass a state trooper at eighty-five miles an hour over the limit. During the chase, they take curves as if there were no such thing as physics, and then they hit the guardrail. Guardrails are their destiny.”

  “Shut up,” Praeger commanded. “That guy’s listening, he looks real mean, and he’s offended.”

  Hardesty burned his fingers on the scalding clam broth, which flowed free of charge from a copper kettle on the bar. They ordered ten grilled prawns, and ate them with bread, hot sauce, and a beer or two, or three—and soon they were limp in the waves of music and noise, brothers to the guardrail men. The entire Broth House seemed to be swaying pleasantly in the wind, like one of the sailing ships that, long before, had tied up at the nearby wharves. They felt that they were on the sea, and the smoke swirling in the center of the room became clouds, sails, and gulls.

  Hardesty quickly forgot all his problems and narrowed in with guileless desire on the brave waitress who, with trays balanced in her hands, repeatedly negotiated the dangerous rapids of the Broth House and its lecherous patrons. To keep the trays level and move through the ravenous crowd, she had to do something like a dance. She was small, but she was lean, strong, and sexy enough to drive everyone in the Broth House crazy. She was deeply tanned from free days in the sun, her legs were trim (undoubtedly from running), and her long graceful arms were lightly muscled in a way that made Hardesty unable to turn away from her or drop his gaze. She wore a white shirt that was open enough to show that the top of her chest was smooth and dark. Her hair was jet black and bouncy, and cut with an upward twirl like that of a popular singer who was the latest rage. Hardesty began to go mad. He, truckers in cowboy hats, local Hobokians, ex-sailors, strangers from Manhattan, and the guardrail crew were mesmerized by her. As she passed Hardesty, she had to turn to face him the way one must do when moving through a crowded corridor on a European train. For Hardesty, breathless and astounded, it was as if a clock had struck midnight on its chimes forty times over, for as she passed him, God bless America, she slowed down, the crowd compressed, and she was pushed up against him as if they were both in a duck press. When he felt her small breasts and nipples sweep slowly across his chest; when he looked into her sunburned face; when he smelled her heated perfume; when her black eyes smashed into him like a lance and ran him over from top to toe with deep extractive pleasure; when, during the friction-laden passage of her thighs and breasts, she smiled and he saw a bright moonlike flash of large, perfect, glistening white teeth; and when as either a joke, an invitation, an involuntary movement, or a commemoration, she briefly pushed her lower body into his, Hardesty’s legs refused to hold him and he went down in excruciating pleasure, dropping to the floor with a strange cry of both frustration and satisfaction that turned Praeger’s head in search of his friend.

  “Where are you?” Praeger asked. “Where’d you go?”

  Hardesty was crawling and lunging forward on the floor in pursuit of her ankles as they receded into a lugubrious forest of pant legs. The patrons of the bar did not like a wave under their feet. It unsettled them, and when Hardesty started knocking people down, Praeger knew that the hornet’s nest had been bumped too hard.

  They began to fight, each man against the other, as if the flood were coming and only one place was left on the ark. There was some poetry in it, in that men were thrown in lovely swanlike parabolas and they produced deep cries of anguish. Mainly, however, it was the kind of nocturnal anarchy that September sees so often, and Hardesty was lucky that his single-minded friend was able to drag him through the smash-up and throw him out the door.

  “Where is she?” Hardesty begged as Praeger pulled him to the old Erie Lackawanna terminus. This was a federal wedding cake, as elegant as a stubborn old dame, made of cream-colored stone and painted iron, and completely deserted. They stumbled through its dark hallways to a ramp of the long-deceased Barclay Street ferry, from the end of which they dangled their feet and hung over the water like lanterns.

  Across the river, Manhattan shimmered in the moonlight—miles of white buildings sparkling like a forest of fireflies. Hardesty was still thinking of the waitress, but Praeger sat and stared over the water like a mad dog. Manhattan, a cage of white ribs and a mass of glowing crystal,
seemed nearly alive. The beauty in it lifted them far above their enemies and their troubles in the world, as if they were looking at life from the vantage point of the dead. Suddenly overcome with affection for the people they loved, they saw before them the city of sunshine and shadow, now covered in moonlight, and they loved it so much that they wanted to hold it in their arms.

  As they watched, a huge front of clouds began to close in from the northwest. Whiter than ice and sparkling as softly as a Swiss mountain village, the city seemed totally unaware of the huge black-and-purple wall that was approaching it. Hardesty thought of the medieval cities that fell to the Mongols or the Turks, and, had it done any good, he would have shouted a warning. The pale buildings looked as vulnerable as spun sugar, and the clouds came forward, their huge rounded fonts like the buttocks of war-horses or the shoulder plates of armor. And their retinue of snakes, the silver and white lightning bolts, struck the ground ahead of the horsemen.

  The first wave broke over New York as the wind came up and made the Hudson into an impassable strait. The cable-hung ramps upon which Hardesty and Praeger sat began to buckle and sway, but they held tightly to the rails, unable to take their eyes off the city. Ten thousand bolts of lightning struck the high towers, plaiting them with white gold and filling the air with thundercrack after thundercrack that made all fixed objects rattle. It flushed rats from their burrows and sent them, in rare panic, squealing through the rain-filled streets. It set a hundred fires in the city of the poor, but the rain was so hard that they were extinguished as quickly as they started—which made them look like the slowly disintegrating spheres of airborne fireworks. When the storm was at its height, it seemed as if waves were breaking upon the city from a sea that floated and raged above. But the city neither flinched, nor blinked, nor bent its back for a moment. It stood fully upright like a range of great mountains, and harvested in the bolts. All the time that the storm was pounding, New York remained serene, with its lights aglow, for its ranks of steady towers were built on bedrock. And in the end, when the sky was blue and white and slow rivers of lightning made only melodic apologies of rolling thunder, it was still shining, innocent, and intent.

  Hardesty thought for a moment that he had seen something of the perfectly just city. When the storm was almost over, he had turned to see Praeger, elated and resolute, staring through the thunderous captions and the thick gray rain.

  “I went to see Binky,” Praeger said. “I sold my soul, and I’m going to be mayor. I’m going to be mayor—of that,” he declared, looking across the water. “And I’m going to do it the way it’s never been done. All the mayors before have stirred, and patched, and maneuvered, and run. We measure them by how well they put off battles. Because they’ve been putting off battles for a hundred years, they’ve divided and armed the city so that if there is a confrontation it will rival Armageddon. I don’t want that. No one does. No one ever did. But should there be a reckoning, I’m going to lead the city as it falls . . . so that I may lead it as it rises.”

  Although he was moved by the verity and magic of Praeger’s resolution, Hardesty still called upon reason, and asked, “How do you know?”

  If human faces are an incentive to clairvoyance, then Praeger, at that moment, was the touchstone of the future. He looked over at Hardesty, and smiled. Hardesty saw in the cold blue eyes, the carefully cut blond hair, the slightly chipped front teeth, and an expression that told of great strength, long-suffering, and everlasting humor, that Praeger had been taken up by the same thing that he himself was seeking. Though he did not know why, he believed him, and he was saddened to see that Praeger’s face told of a future battle as certainly as if it had been a memorial frieze.

  TO BE mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.

  The last thing that Peter Lake would have called himself was a saint. And he was right, since he was not a saint, and never would be. However, he was certainly becoming more and more unhinged with each passing day, and he knew that the way things were he would not be able to take refuge in reason even were he to desire it. A terrible agony possessed him, made him giddy, and caused him to walk about and chatter hysterically. Everything was either exquisitely light or irredeemably black. Though his only middle ground lay in the machines, even they led him into the uncontrollable reveries of which his fellow workers had taken cautious note. They had learned to live with him, for his madness had not turned to cruelty or greed. But, as they suspected, when he was with them, he was restrained. On the outside, it was quite different.

  “Gimme some Spanish mountain-climbing eggs,” he demanded cheerfully in his Madison Square Irish. “Three over easy, two very sqwunchy and wet, like newborn wildebeests wrapped up in the amnioc, and one lone hardboiled—the Aztec god of the sun. Ya folla? Whatsa matter? Cat got your tongue! You know what a cat is? I’ll tell you . . . but soft-ly. A cat is an excuse for a lonely woman to talk to herself. That’s what a cat is. Tugboat.

  “But, coming back around to breakfast, I like bananas. I demand them with my meals. I demand them! Bring me some. No! Wait! I’ll have a footcake instead. Tugboat.

  “I am poor, it is true. I am one of those about whom nothing was ever known—but the city is mine. Then why is it, tell me, that I look around, and there I am, way up there, the master of nothing I see? Is it possible that, on this continent of earth, there are those primitive creatures who never wear a hat, those gandy dancers and girls who jump out of cakes, those saps, tools, berks, and ocuses who do not actually exist no more than I will or not, and accept that which well-nigh cannot be? Impossible. It’s impossible! No more likely, say, than a Baptist church without a school bus. You say what you will, my healthy-faced friend, standing there as jovial as Humpty Dumpty. I like your patience. However, there’s something intensely frustrating about talking to you, and I’d rather sail through the gilded mist. Tugboat.

  “All right. I relent. Change my order. Bring me Wildensteen’s monkey bread, hot liverwurst, coconuts, and sea foam. That’s a good breakfast. You see what I’m driving at? I desire . . . I desire. I’m confused, you see. But I try! I try! And I’ve got this strength which pushes me there, pushes me. It hurts, but I’m going, I’m going. Tugboat.”

  He went on like this for hours, overflooding with words that broke and popped in strangely ordered disorder, and fell from his lips like the foam that he thought he liked for breakfast. The faster he talked, the faster he talked, until he was white-hot, talking in tongues, demanding this, demanding that, slamming his fist down, screaming about order in the world, balance, rewards, justice, and veracity. There was no justice, he said. Oh yes there was. But it was very high and very complex, and to understand it you had to understand beauty, because beauty was justice without equation. “Tugboat.”

  No one objected, no one was inconvenienced, and no one was frightened. This was undoubtedly because Peter Lake was not in a restaurant, and he was not addressing a waiter or a cook. He was, rather, at the edge of an empty parking lot, talking to a mailbox. If anyone came to mail a letter, Peter Lake would become silent, lean against the object of his diatribe, and smile as the stranger pushed paper down its throat. Then Peter Lake would say to the mailbox, “Who was that? Did you know him? I mean is he a regular around here or what?” He was jealous.

  When night fell, he was often hungry and thirsty and would
go to Times Square to get some papaya juice, which he loved because, when he drank it, it made him feel just like anyone else, just like a businessman or a registered nurse. Perhaps because it made him feel this way, he had thrown before the act of obtaining it an almost impossible obstacle. On his way through the streets, he practiced ordering in a full mellifluous voice that the best professional announcer would have envied. Needless to say, speaking in full voice as he moved through the crowds of evening did no more for his reputation than did declaiming to mailboxes, gas cylinders, and motorcycle sidecars. But in New York no one had a reputation anyway.

  “I’ll have a large papaya, to go,” he said. “I’ll have a large papaya, to go. I’ll have a large papaya, to go. I’ll have a large papaya, to go.”

  He said it a thousand times. But when he finally approached the dazed, juice-stained man at the papaya counter, he went completely blank.

  “What do you want?” the ragged papaya man asked Peter Lake.

  Instead of answering, Peter Lake began to giggle, laugh, and snort. He exploded into half-suppressed shrieks, clenched his eyes in hysteria, and swayed back and forth until his laughter was a series of wild squeals and bellows and he could hardly stand up. This was the affliction that kept him from papaya juice.

  Finally, he took control of himself. He had to stop laughing, because his chest and stomach were sore, and he opened his eyes and cleared his throat. But when he saw the suspicious one-eyed squint of the papaya man he burst into a breathless shriek that took possession of his entire body.

  In painful hysteria, laughing all the way, he returned to the city of the poor, where he entered an abandoned tenement, descended to the basement, and stretched out, sobbing, on a sack of coal. He didn’t cry for long. Exhaustion spared him that, and kicked him deep into oblivion.

  Sometime during the night, when the streets had fallen silent and the October moon was about to descend into the Pennsylvania forests, Peter Lake was suddenly awakened. He felt his heart jump as it started in panic to deal with whatever it was that had grabbed him from behind. As soon as he was awake enough to think, he assumed that three or four attackers, all of enormous strength, had surprised him as he slept on the coal sack. He expected the exquisite tortures that people who go to abandoned tenement basements at four in the morning mete out to the people who are already there. His only hope was to frighten his assailants with his insanity. However, he felt regretfully sane. In fact, he was so lucid, rational, and calm, that he might just as well have been a diplomat at work on his memoirs in front of a crackling hickory fire in the hunt country north of Boston.