Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

A young girl, a frailty, simple and true, who had been unable to stand up from the piano and had had to be carried; a girl half his age; a girl who could not shoot a gun, had never been in an oyster house, atop a tower, or under the wharves; a girl hotter always than noon in August; a girl who knew nothing; had thrown him so hard that he would be out of breath forever.

The rich died, too, disappointing all those who thought that somehow they didn’t. Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love.

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one’s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

The reeds and grasses on the hot mounds and in the ditches turned green with envy and begged to go along (which is why they waved when the train went by).

“All great discoveries,” the elder Marratta had once said, “are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”

In San Francisco, walking into a bank was like walking into a palace—which was the way it should have been. But in New York, banks were cathedrals, which was perhaps not the way it should have been. If a law had been passed to change each bank into a church and each second vice-president into a priest, New York would instantly have become the center of Christendom.

“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.

“My purpose,” he said, suddenly soft and benevolent, “is to tag this world with wider and wider rainbows, until the last is so perfect and eternal that it will catch the eye of the One who has abandoned us, and bring Him to right all the broken symmetries and make life once again a still and timeless dream. My purpose, Mr. Marratta, is to stop time, to bring back the dead. My purpose, in one word, is justice.”

Winter, it was said, was the season in which time was superconductive—the season when a brittle world might shatter in the face of astonishing events, later to reform in a new body as solid and smooth as young transparent ice.

A cat is an excuse for a lonely woman to talk to herself.

Ha!