Winter's Tale Part 11

She dreamed of spring in a great city of fuming gray squares and whited sepulchers, of bending willows, and rivers that turned up their spring bellies in wind-flaked sapphire, a city that coiled around its own churches and squares in a weave of streets like a basket of nested snakes, a city of smooth silk hats and cool gray coats, of silent music played tin flas.h.i.+ng cloud light, of delirious green trees, of stores that led to secret tunnels, of clear days, and crystal palaces, and endless portraits ever arising. This city became alive, and was her lover. She took it without inhibition, grappling with it breathlessly and nude. She sweated, rolled her closed eyes, and sawed back and forth from thigh to thigh, as it overwhelmed her with its surging colors.

The dream taught her that cities are not unlike huge animals which eat, sleep, work, and love. It taught her what it was like for something as ma.s.sy and giant as a whale to make love unbraced in the gravityless blue ocean. And it taught her that her future (she had always known that her future was in her, waiting to be shaken out) was in the city, and that she would spend her life in the place that she had seen in the dream.

When she awakened she was still half dreaming and still wet from her extraordinary labor, but she calculated immediately that, if she were to go away with the baby, Mrs. Gamely would have more than enough upon which to survive, and might even help someone else.

Mrs. Gamely's initial opposition was silenced by the beauties and accuracies of the recounted dream."Though I haven't ever been there," Virginia said,"I seem to have known it all well enough to have created it." To Virginia's surprise, Mrs. Gamely did not bring up the misfire with Boissy d'Anglas. Instead, she grew as excited asa follower of a lost cause who sees in her old age the possibility that the cause may revive and succeed.

They embraced a thousand times before Virginia left, and it made them cry each time. The last thing Mrs. Gamely said to her daughter was,"Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. Rise, Virginia. Rise and see the whole world."

Virginia did not know exactly what her mother had meant.

THE lake was covered with snow by the time Virginia and her baby rode along its length in a huge troika pulled by horses heavy enough to shake even the thick ice of the Lake of the Coheeries as they pounded down the snow road. By afternoon, they were in the mountains, ascending steadily, turning on hairpin terraces from which they could see a world of white and blue. Now and then a snowy hawk rose from the background camouflage of glistening bone-white fields, and navigated the ocean of air, slipping sideways on the wing more gracefully than a skater.

As they neared the top of the range, they watched the effects of high winds upon the acc.u.mulated drifts. Powerful continental gusts burst upon cornices and sculptured ridges, sending up vertical jets of loosed snow. Behind these white silk curtains were glowing rims of gold where the sun shone through their crests. There was so much screaming and whistling that the bells of the troika could hardly be heard. The sleigh driver halted on a round cakelike k.n.o.b, the summit. Resting there, they saw a landscape of ice and snow crossed and covered by hills and ridges from which white powder rocketed into the air. The horses dipped their heads and shook their ice-encrusted manes."From here on," said the sleigh driver, shouting with difficulty through his m.u.f.fler and the blasts of mountain air,"you can't see the lake, but only the east and, soon, the Hudson. Take one last look, for we are now on our way to a different place."

The road led not through fields and past overlooks, but deeper and deeper within an untouched forest, between rock cliffs a thousand feet high, near ice-covered gorges where falls and flumes pounded like jackhammers and covered hundred-foot oaks in freezing spray.

They glided over dimly lit roads, springing upon shocked families of deer that had an air of offended innocence, and which they sent white-tailed into the forest, carrying their solid six-foot horns like little battleaxes with which they smashed down waxy bushes b.l.o.o.d.y with red berries. They drove through vaulted mahogany-colored courses made by trees and snow, and the horses leapt ahead, swallowing the s.p.a.ce in front of them and effortlessly compressing the air of the cool snow tunnels. Virginia held her baby to her, inside her coat. His name, for the moment anyway, was Martin d'Anglas, which seemed very apt for a swordsman who swung on ropes, or a legionnaire, and much less apt for a little newt all wrapped up in blue. His mouth and nose stuck out of a navy cashmere balaclava, and he took the cold air like a puppy. Virginia threw back her head to look for hawks and eagles, and was surprised at the many she saw perched in gothic nests high in the trees. They watched, unconcerned, as the troika slipped past."Look at all those dignified eagles up there," she said to the driver."If they didn't look like they were made of porcelain and gold, I would swear that they were justices of the Supreme Court, in retirement."

A long gradual slope led to the riverbank, and they came down it just at dusk, to an inn by the Hudson. Pigs huddled together in the yard, singing for the innkeeper to let them into the pig quarters for the night. m.u.f.fins of pure white smoke emerged from the chimney. Virginia and Martin (she had already begun to p.r.o.nounce the name in English) would stay until early morning, when a giant iceboat that could hold half a dozen pa.s.sengers and their luggage would take them downriver as far as the open channel, where they would get a boat south. In the middle of the night, the innkeeper's wifea" a woman with cheeks redder than the rash that sometimes appeared on Martin's two tiny hamsa"knocked on the door. Virginia switched on the light. She was uncomfortable from a lush and tremendous dinner of lambchops, cornbread, and dandelion salad. The light glared at her, and, in response to its rays, Martin began to punch with his springy little arms and legs. Virginia held her robe closed."What is it?" she asked.

"Sorry to wake you, dear," said the innkeeper's wife with a voice that had lived many years in a crock of mint jelly,"but Mr. Fteleyjust got a telephone call from Oscawana. The iceboat's not running, something about the drifts of snow, so you'll have to skate down there tomorrow, first thing. The cutter will wait until noon. If you leave at eight, you should make it in plenty of time. Mr. Fteley will pull a sled with the luggage."

"I see," said Virginia."How many miles is it from here to Oscawana?"

"Just twenty," answered Mrs. Fteley,"and the wind will be at your back."

"Oh," said Virginia, as Mrs. Fteley disappeared. She turned off the light, and then fell asleep within five seconds. She dreamed of skating, and (as so often happened) the next morning she found herself replicating exactly what she had imagined.

FOR hours and hours, she skated nearly in a trance, centered between the mountain banks, on a road of white ice. She was one of those women whose legs seem to come up to everyone else's shoulders. It would have been impossible to keep her in jail, since, no matter how far across the room the jailer hung his key she would have been able to hook the ring around a toe and bring it to her with one sinuous fold of thigh and calf. So she was a natural speed skater. One long push was good for fifty yards: and she could push for hours. She was only five eleven, but her figure was perfect. Her hair was blue-black, as glistening as the thick pelt of a healthy seal. She had a perfectly formed white smile that was soft, inviting, and full of power. She was not quite as arresting in photographs as she was in the flesh, for her beauty was sprung directly from her soul, and proved that physical features count little unless they are illumined from within. Nor was she beautiful in a coy sense, either. When she was severe, she looked severe. When she was angry, she looked angry.

With Martin bundled up and riding on her back, she skated downriver, rounding its curling bends and keeping her eyes upon the converging sh.o.r.elines and ice. She would stop every now and then and put Martin in front of her, kneeling to check on him. He was so well wrapped that he slept as if he were at home in a cradle. Then she would hoist him up and begin again, more and more powerfully.

Though the wind was at her back, she was going fast enough so that her hair was pushed from her face.

Behind her at a distance of a mile or so came Mr. Fteley, the innkeeper, pulling a light sled. They traveled silently past sleeping settlements of red brick and slattern wood. At a bend in the river, near Const.i.tution Island, Virginia saw an icehouse in which she decided to rest and escape the wind. Skating at full speed, she turned to stop just before the dock, the silver blades of her skates sending up an abrupt shower of fresh-milled crystals that hung in the air and sparkled. Around the side of the building was an entrance bay for boats and sleds, through which she glided into the dark interior, expelling half a dozen frightened sparrows. It was full of hay and templed blocks of ice in gla.s.sy walls that reached up to the roof beams. She was much warmer away from the wind, and she glowed from her exercise. She swung Martin around and unwrapped him. He was awake and smiling, as if he were in on a wonderful joke. Perhaps he was happy because his mother was radiant in the darkness, her cold reddened face central to the scheme of symmetrical light that came through the cracks in the walls. As the blood coursed through her, it brought with it lucidity, equanimity, and a light pounding rhythm that set the baby up and had probably made him smile. While she fed him she listened to her own blood beating, and tilted her head back to stare into the darkness, where the birds lived, beyond the ice blocks.

Long before, in the most severe winter the Coheeries had ever known (until the one they were in) the farmers had cut ice from the Lake of the Coheeries and filled an icehouse on the lakesh.o.r.e not far from where the Gamelys lived. There was so much of it that it remained, underneath fresh ice cut in subsequent years, for half a century. Then the icehouse was sold to a man who wanted it for a printing shop, and no one put any more ice in it. Soon the old ice was reached, and one summer, when Virginia was six or seven, she was playing near the blocks that had been recently uncovered after half a hundred years. The unrelenting heat that had driven her inside the icehouse was melting these veteran gla.s.s bricks and creating little rivers of fresh water. Virginia thought that she was alone. She pressed her Palms up against a melting slab full of stilled bubbles, and licked it.

Mrs. Gamely had warned her to stay out of the icehouse, because it was full of terrible dangers."The Donamoula comes into the icehouse at night," Mrs. Gamely had said,"to chew on blocks of ice and slap his tongue against the salt. If he sees you there," she told the rapt little girl,"he might think that you are an hors d'oeuvre. Stay out of the icehouse!"

Though afraid of the Donamoula, Virginia had wanted nonetheless to see him, and maybe even to ride him across the lake, like a torpedo. The way Mrs. Gamely described him, it was a safe bet to warrant that even if he did eat little girls, it was only by mistake. Anyway, she moved about with the stiffness peculiar to children who imagine that they are being observed by sea monsters or things that live under the bed at night, and every once in a while she would glance toward the lake door to see if the Donamoula had arrived.

Just when she had completely forgotten the Donamoula, she heard a percussive, wet, sudden, fishy slap. She would not have moved, could not have moved, for all the blueberries in the Adirondacks. Again, the same fishy slap, met this time in the cold mysterious air by yet another, of lower pitch. Dizzy with fear, Virginia moved her head a quarter-turn. No Donamoula. She looked around, convinced that she was about to be encoiled by the swift forty-foot tongue that could catch a cherry pie the way a darter newt catches a bloime bug. No Donamoula, and yet the sounds kept cominga"slap slap, quasha, flas.h.i.+p, swipa, spatch!

As her fear subsided she realized that the noise was coming from atop the pyramid of ice. She climbed up, numbing her hands and knees. At the summit, near the hottest s.p.a.ce under the eaves, not far from a summer sunray that had broken through a rotted shake and shot down in a tight yellow beam, was a little blue lake of newly melted fifty-year-old ice. Splas.h.i.+ng about in this lake were two enormous shad that, years before she was born, had been frozen still, and had now come to life and were smas.h.i.+ng their flippant tails in protest and joy. They were silver and gold, and their eyes looked like wise old rainbows.

Virginia remembered the intense unmatchable pleasure of taking the two shad by their twitching scaly tails and carrying them down the pyramid so that she could toss them, in the most beautiful, airborne, moment of their lives, into the lake, where they vanished in the dark watera"perhaps to tell their tale to the other fish and refresh the population with the intricate mystery of youth in age, and age in youth. Magic, she knew, was all about time, and could stop it and hold it for the inquisitive eye to look through as if through cold and splendid ice.

She s.h.i.+fted her gaze from the darkness to the white glare flooding through the doorway. For a fraction of a second, Mr. Fteley appeared in the opening, panting along in front of the sled, and then disappeared. Martin was quickly rewrapped. Up he went onto her back, and out she flew from the icehouse, like a racehorse from the start, chasing after Mr. Fteley.

She was in a fine mood when, in a confusion of wind that whipped their scarves in all directions, she caught him. Shouting now over the anarchic winda"they were in a widening baya"she said,"Mr. Fteley, why can't the iceboat make it upriver? The ice is smooth and thick. I don't understand."

"The drift wall," shouted Fteley.

"The what?"

"The drift wall!" he shouted again."By pure coincidence, it snowed all in one place just north of Oscawana, and then the wind piled it up in a wall across the ice. It blocks the river completely, as sure as my name is Fteley, from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e as high as the hills on both banks. They can't tunnel through because they fear it will collapse as it melts."

"Does it block the whole river?"

"Yes," he shouted over the wind.

"As high as the surrounding hills?"

"Yes."

"How high are they?"

"A thousand feet," he screamed back."We'll have to climb it and slide down the other side."

When they rounded one of the alpine bends that made the Hudson Highlands look like a collection of looming rhinoceros horns, they saw the drift walla"which, unlike Rome, had sprung up in a day, and which had about it the smooth, thoughtless, malicious air of a modern skysc.r.a.per. The drift wall was a pile of snow that stretched from mountain to mountain across the solidified river. It was steep, a thousand feet high, and shrouded at the top by a tumbling mist that devoured itself and regenerated, blooming like time-lapsed roses."I can't climb that," said Mr. Fteley,"not with this luggage certainly. I thought it was lower, and didn't know about all that stuff at the top." His head was bent in awe and fear, his eyes fixed on the long lateral summit."Christ," he said,"you may think that I'm a chicken, but I've got to consider Mrs. Fteley and my little Felicia. Why don't you come back upriver and stay with us, free of charge, until the d.a.m.n thing melts. It'd be a mistake, miss, to try to climb that."

"Mr. Fteley," said Virginia, her blood still hot from the skating and her heart still lively from the glory of resurrected colors that she had remembered in the dark icehouse,"I don't think that you're a chicken, I understand that you've got to think of Mrs. Fteley and Felicia, and I certainly wouldn't ask you to climb that because of my luggage. So why don't you go back, and send me my things whenever the iceboat can get through. Meanwhile, Martin and I will go over."

"But, miss! You'll disappear in that foam up there. And if you fall back, there's nothing to clutch on to. You'll tumble all the way down and die."

"Mr. Fteley," said Virginia, her eyes full of lights,"the way I feel now, I could leap that wall in one jump. And if I climb it, as I will, I'll go in one sure step after another, I won't be afraid, I won't fall back, and I will get to the other side."

"How can you know that? How can you be sure?"

"Simple," she said,"I've seen myself there."

"You've been over already?" he asked, somewhat confused.

"No."

"You've imagined then. That's different. That's a cat flying after a bird."

"No, I haven't imagined. I've seen. That's no cat flying after a bird."

"What do you mean, you've seen? You've seen the future?" "Yes."

"You're crazy!" he said, with an aggressive, nasty lurch."Youcan't see the future. You can't feel the future. People like you end up in loony bins. It just doesn't cut."

"Like h.e.l.l, Mr. Fteley," answered Virginia, quite angry that she had been attacked for giving an honest answer."It cuts. And I'll get to the other side." Then she grew even angrier, and turned on him for the way in which he was looking at her."The world is full of leaden slugs like you, innkeeper, who are afraid of the powers of the heart. You hope that mountain climbers and acrobats fall, that daring bridges collapse, that those who can feel the future be punished. If everyone were like you, Mr. Fteley, we'd still be in hides and skins. Hides and skins. Go back to the inn. Cook up some farina. Put your spittoon on your head. You can send our luggage after the thaw, because Martin and I are going to the city."

With that, she turned away from the innkeeper and began climbing. She found that by means of a chain of small steps driven into the dense snow, she soon was high above the ground, like a worker on the face of a dam. Had she fallen backward, she and Martin would have gone through the ice like a cannonball, never to be seen again. But she didn't look back, the left foot was always forward, she breathed calmly, and she concentrated. In an hour she was nearly at the top, standing vertically in the holds she had dug in the snow, with hands and fingers stuck in as deep as she could push them and spread as wide as she could spread them to get a grip. Sleeping peacefully on her back, Martin was suspended a thousand feet above the ice. Down below, Mr. Fteley was running back and forth like an ant; amazed, afraid, and angry. Virginia slowed just five feet from the ledge that formed the top of the drift wall. Unfortunately, it leaned out. To get over it and into the curtain of mist, she would have to climb while leaning back. How? The snow was hard to hold. She imagined herself and Martin falling, and, as she did, she felt her previously strong hold loosening. Then it occurred to her that she could reverse that effect, and she tried to do so. She imagined herself sticking to the wall, proceeding with surety and grace, losing not a second of her momentum. When she had become agitated with that vision, she made her move, punching holes in the compressible snow while saying to herself,"Go! go!" and she moved up and out. She did hang outward for a few seconds, but her momentum took care ofher and thrust her over the edge. Afterward, she thought she heard one long clear blast of a French horn, and realized that it was an illusion of her heart springing free. All Mr. Fteley saw was that she was swallowed up by the mist.

She found herself thrown about by gusts of wind and visible currents of whitened air that rushed at her from all directions. She didn't actually walk across the ridge, she was waltzed across by the turbulencea"which occasionally picked her up and spun her upside down but always put her back again on her feet. In the end it simply spat her out on the other side, having treated her with unusual and uncharacteristic gentleness (all because of the baby on her back, for whom allowances had to be made). Straightening her hair, she walked a few steps through the thinning mist, and then was in the clear again.

There, fifty miles to the south, was the city.

IT was another worlda"shadowy, white, and, above all, silent. The city's silence, however, was only the solidification of all its countless sounds, fused by ma.s.s and distance. Against a background of viscous blue, towers rose like bone. Volumes of unheard sound lifted from among them and floated up, channeled and directed to a place unknown, where it would be received as a dense static, a hissing, a white noise, like surf. The light, too, would compress upon a distant sh.o.r.e. As steadily as a machine, the city signaled its existence in a spectrum of low thunder, with arms outstretched to the future, and memories of what lay ahead pulling it in omnipotent traction.

The air was as clear as that over the Lake of the Coheeries, and yet there were within it distorting lenses that magnified and reduced entire coasts, rivers, and mountain rangesa"without explanation and seemingly at will, but always with pleasing effect. Virginia found that she was able to enter the scene before her wherever she wanted, approaching closely to see its every detail. What most attracted her were the ways in which things moved. Seen from afar, they seemed to fit an overall pattern of which they appeared to be (and must have been) ignorant. s.h.i.+ps traveling on the rivers did so with a strong counterpoint forged into their forward motion: it dogged them likemagnetism, and could be felt as surely as the s.h.i.+p itself could be seen. The yaw and pitch of these vessels weaved invisible threads, as did the coding of the whitecaps; the pa.s.sage of clouds; the very busy, mouselike galloping of traffic on distant expressways; and the hemispheric tracking of reflected light in jagged palisades of soaring gla.s.s.

Down below, the ice was clean and white, a slab of enamel that did not seem cold. She saw the enormous iceboat pinned at its dock, and a line of people stretched from the loading pier to a big Hamilton-cla.s.s cutter, stacks smoking lightly, which rested on the ice, frozen in. People were streaming on board to weight the cutter and smash the ice ways upon which it unwillingly lay. It was pointed like a compa.s.s needle, its orientation an appeal for the chance to hit blue water and steam through the Tappan Zee toward open ocean. Not even a child could have been more impatient, and, even trapped in the ice, it was so lean and powerful that it looked like a cross between a steam engine and a knife.

As Virginia approached the cutter she noticed that the officers were pacing back and forth, upset that the weight of a thousand extra pa.s.sengers and their baggage was not enough to break the prison of ice. She walked up a snow ramp to an open door in the hull.

"We've taken all the pa.s.sengers we can, ma'am," a young officer said to her."There's really no more room."

"But you've taken on pa.s.sengers in the first place to add more weight. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the officer, with an amused smile,"but one more person isn't going to make much of a difference." He indicated the great size of the s.h.i.+p, and he didn't seem to care that Virginia and Martin would be left alone on the ice. In fact, he seemed to derive pleasure from his indifference.

"Two people," Virginia a.s.serted quite severely, holding up Martin. Martin burped.

"All right," said the officer."But you're the last."

"I can see that," Virginia said, looking about the empty ice.

She put Martin on the s...o...b..nk, and jumped onto the s.h.i.+p. There was a creak in the ice that made everyone look up."Just a coincidence," the officer stated.

Martin began to kick and scream. He didn't like being the onlyone not on the ark."Now, now," said his mother as she was about to pick him up and take him aboard. The officer had turned away to scold a young boy who was trying to fire a torpedo at Verplanck. As soon as Martin was lifted over the bulkhead and taken inboard, there was a sharp explosive crack and the s.h.i.+p settled into the river, sending up thousands of tons of green water that washed over the ice like a tidal wave and froze by the time it reached sh.o.r.e. The pa.s.sengers cheered.

Martin was vigorously applauded by all around him. Virginia did not lose the opportunity to address the officer. She cleared her throat and said,"We want to ride on the bridge, and lunch with the captain. We would like a five-ounce filet mignon, watercress salad, a baked potato, tea, a strawbery tart, and some gently warmed milk." "And just who the h.e.l.l are you?" asked the officer, unaware of their role in the recent drama of physics.

Rather than explain, Virginia took Martin aside and fed him herself, and then had the steaming oyster pan roast and hot b.u.t.termilk bread that had been offered to the pa.s.sengers. She had learned her first lesson of the city, and she was unperturbed.

Mrs. Gamely had a small book of paintings by the artists of New York and the Hudson, and when she leafed through its polished pages she felt much the same as some Lake of the Coheeries women felt when they were in church. As she looked at this holy book, she would often say things that Virginia found incomprehensible. Now, because of the ungrateful Coast Guard officera"a man whose gold regalia on a rich navy coat made him look like a painting in motiona"Virginia understood, and she speculated that the city would be cold, completely of itself, unconscious, that its every move would be transcendent, and that each of its hundred million flas.h.i.+ng scenes would strike a moral lesson.

Such a city would extend vision, intensify pity, telescope emotion, and float the heart the way the sea is gently buoyant with great s.h.i.+ps. To do this, it would have to be a cold instrument. And, despite its beauty, it would have to be cruel.

This was deeply bound within the book of images. Only they could explain it. Out of respect and love for her mother, Virginia had learned to regard paintings as something in which time wa.s.shattered and light was understood, and to know the steadfast link between high emotions and beautiful images. She knew that the image had to be cold, because its task required silence and detachment in the presence of the intangible powers it conveyed, but she had not realized until now why it had to be cruel as well. The cruelty and coldness were almost physical forces. As they acted upon the heart, they made it rise and feel. They purified motives and tested the soul with uncompromising certainty. Images and people had to be strong enough to stand by themselves. For when they did, they had the capacity and power to be interlinked, and to serve.

Virginia stood on deck for as long as she could. The ice-choked river ebbed and flowed from and against the staid sides of the s.h.i.+p, and the wind was like a grindstone of ice. Though he was trim for his age and was not coated with too much blubber, Martin was as warm and flexible as an Eskimo baby, and seemed completely impervious to the cold. In the end, she had to go inside because she was cold. He didn't mind the warm cabin, and as they sailed down the river he made bicycling motions with his legs and practiced facial gestures.

Virginia peered from the porthole and saw many familiar scenes. On the mountainous banks, trees bent and swayed in the sunny wind. Houses of stone and wood stood on hillsides crossed and bound by miles of neat dry-wall. Great oaks loomed over the river. In Croton Bay, the boys were playing hockey or speeding along the ice with makes.h.i.+ft sails that they had filched from their mothers' linen closets. The hills of Ossining, and the streets that climbed them, seemed from the river to be sad and forgotten. Ossining was peculiar, and shoddy, too (for it had become poor), but its steep streets, slate roofs, and ma.s.sive oaks were portraits of beauty and honor.

They pa.s.sed Tarrytown and the Tappan Zee, where rolling jolly fields were the skirts to craggy thunderous mountains, and orchards came fearlessly to the base of cliffs. Sailing through a gap of pylons in the Tappan Zee bridge, the cutter's black steelwork came near to colliding with the high roadway but only saluted it with smoke. Half a rnile south, the Palisades began, and the city itself came into view. As soon as Virginia saw the gates of the s.h.i.+ning city, and the white clouds sweeping over, she knew that she was meant to be there. Itdid not draw people to it the way it did for nothing. It was G.o.d's crucible, and she was on her way into it.

Down they glided, they glided down, on the fast-flowing riverthat swept by the town. As they accomplished their nearly silent traverse, the setting sun made the gla.s.s palisades and gray towers a s.h.i.+eld of gold. And as its light disappeared from all but the tips of spires which glowed like smoldering punks that children used to signal by, the city turned on its cool chemical lamps: a hundred million flashes, fires, altars, and hearths racked on mountainous towers with castled topsa"the whole masterpiece bullying Virginia in the insistent and gentle fas.h.i.+on of a good teacher. Next to this enormous harrow of gold and green, of s.h.i.+ning ledges and needles, the s.h.i.+ps tied up at North River piers looked like insects running along the crack of a baseboard.

"Look, Martin," Virginia said, holding him so that he could see the whole thing,"... the golden city."

After ten miles of lights and towers, they pulled up at the fire-boat pier on the Battery and the pa.s.sengers of the cutter were discharged into the night. The officers wanted to speed them into the city so that they could take their s.h.i.+p beyond the Narrows for some real work amid white waves as tall as church steeples, and over a prairie of green troughs. The pa.s.sengers pa.s.sed through the wooden halls of the fireboat station and found themselves immediately face to face with teeming streets. Thus the country people were thrown into the city's gaping mouth.

VIRGINIA and Martin began to walk aimlessly through the cold. She had neither a plan nor the slightest idea of how to make her way, and by ten o'clock she found herself, exhausted and limp, leaning against a tile arch in Grand Central Station. Streams of people went by without noticing her, because, in her country clothes, she looked like a beggar woman. The several hours of walking in the cold had made her very hungry, and it was a fine coincidence that she was standing just outside the Oyster Bar, where rooms of happy diners deep underground ate frothy oyster stews or sizzling fish steaks while white-jacketed barmen served up clams and oysters on a productionline worthy of its finer, more anarchic, deeper-underground predeessors. Virginia pressed against a window and took all this in, but only with her eyes.

Now and then, someone looked up and saw her. This was the heart of the city. In these marble corridors, beggar women roamed by the hundreds. Those who looked up would not look up for long. Virginia was about to turn away and wander, when she saw a young woman on the far side of the dining room rise and peer at her. Then the woman pointed, and asked silently, with gestures that were clear,"Is that you?" Virginia looked behind her, as she often did when people called out, thinking that they had meant someone else. But then the other woman, who was wearing a green silk dress, began to wade through the crowded restaurant.

Waiting for the green silk to duck under and then surface amid the arches, Virginia worried that, because she was tired, she must have looked terrible. But she was wrong. Even though she was slightly winter-frayed by the city, and had walked about too long without a hot drink and some moments of sitting down in a warm room, she still was painfully beautiful. And though cold and tired, she stood straight. When the woman in green emerged from the domes and tiles, Virginia saw a face that she recognized from the Lake of the Coheeries. It was Jessica Penn, a childhood friend from many summers past.

For several generations, the Penns had come to the Lake of the Coheeries each summer (the men for weekends and Augusts, the women and children for an entire season) to watch the light layer itself across the lake, to sit on the porch in world-shaking thunderstorms, to sail for a day and night without coming about once, to anchor in a cove of straight rock walls that no one had ever seen or would see again, to run through blue-green forests suspended in summer's slow northern time, to come to know the faces, laughter, and eccentricities of those whose fate in life was to die and be half-remembered by children."Yes," someone might say, fifty years later, 1 think I remember Aunt Marjorie. She was the one who tied bells to the pet bear, showed us tricks with magnets, and baked ginger cookies. Or was that Aunt Helen?"

Virginia heard the sound of her oars as she rowed amid thereeds, a child in full summer. Shuddering like a crazed cymbal, the sun lighted the Lake of the Coheeries until it was as hot and as light-green as the banks of the Nile. Mrs. Gamely, a much younger woman was calling down from the house,"Virginia... Virginia... Virginia...", and the call was muted by the heat and distance."Virginia... Virginia," she called, as the oars dipped in the dark water and Virginia rowed hard to return home. But, though once the oars had been dipped dreamlike into the dark water, the lake had turned to ice with the sadness of the pa.s.sing years.

One winter, very early on, Theodore Gamely took Virginia with him to inspect the Penn house. Neither water nor ice, the lake was impa.s.sable, and to get to the other side they went a long distance by sleigh and on skis, and traveled at times through tunnels in the high drifts. The Penns' house was an empty ice palace of silent tortured rooms. Oriental rugs, summer furniture, National Geographics, fis.h.i.+ng equipment, puzzles, and disconnected lamps huddled in the cold. Snow enveloped the house all the way up to its second-story windows and made it seem like a long-forgotten cave. As her father went from room to room checking for damage, Virginia stayed on the ground floor, trapped by the timeless stares of ancient Penns in many colorful paintings. There they remained all winter, in their old-fas.h.i.+oned finery, still and forgotten, trying to come out of the paintings and embrace one another. When Theodore Gamely came down the stairs, satisfied that all was well, he found that his little daughter, bundled in her furs, was cryinga"because, she had said, the people in the paintings were dead, and they had to stay alone and apart in this cold room under the snow. But then her father picked her up and took her to each painting, recounting as best he could its history. He showed her old Isaac, whom she had loved very much because of his sad and gentle face, and because he was almost as small as a child; he showed her Isaac Penn's wife, Abigail, their sons Jack and Harry, and their daughters Beverly and Willa."Harry is Jessica's daddy,' he said."He's alive, isn't he?"

"Yes," said Virginia, sniffling, and not quite sure, because she was so young that she hardly remembered seeing Harry Penn a few times the previous summer.

"And here," said her father,"is Willa. Willa is alive, too. She lives in Boston."

"Who's that?" asked Virginia. They stepped forward a few paces in the gloom, and looked up at a high cold wall upon which hung a portrait of a young woman.

"That's Beverly," said Theodore Gamely."I remember her only vaguely. One night, a long time ago, I went on a sleigh ride with Beverly. We went very fast, faster I think than I have ever gone since. We stopped at an inn, where we played Duck Thumb. I was just a little boy: almost as young as you."

"And who was that?" asked Virginia, pointing to a painting directly opposite the one of Beverly.

"That," her father answered,"is Peter Lake. He was the man who drove the sleigh. You see how they stare across the room? They loved one another, but she died when she was younga"I remember the summer when they came to the lake without hera"and he disappeared forever."

Virginia seemed likely to cry again, so he said,"It's true. People die. That's what happens. But think of the children. There's Jessica, her cousin John, and the Penn children from Boston. You shouldn't be worrying about these things, little girl." He brushed her hair from her forehead and kissed her. Then they left that freezing gallery, and Virginia would always remember the colorful spirits, floating about her in the half-light, as if she had known them. But though she remembered their stories, she could not recall their faces.

Here, in another gallery, underground, was Jessicaa"like Virginia, a full-blown beauty, though the difference between city and country was profound and apparent.

They were somewhat taken aback by the way in which they had aged, and, at once, they knew that they could not resume the friends.h.i.+p they had had as young girls. Knowing this, they were restrained, though they could feel a certain new warmth between them, born of the mutual realization that they were not foolishly effusive, and had developed into dignified and intelligent presences unwilling to barter away what they had become, for a short-lived reminiscence that could not have been sustained.

Martin threw a reflexive punch at his mother's friend, who then led both of them through the Oyster Bar to a large circular table where Virginia sat down and was introduced, round robin, to Jessica's numerous companions.

It was a journalists' dinner, and, among journalists, Praeger de Pinto (though quite young) was the most eminent. In addition to being managing editor of both The Sun and The Whale (that is, The New York Evening Sun, and The New York Morning Whale), he was engaged to Jessica Penn, and was therefore the leader of the ganga"though he would have been anyway. He knew just about everything, and, due to his position, he knew that much more.

"You look like you've had a hard journey," he said.

"I have."

"Have you come from the north?" he asked, having heard of the refugees occasioned by the amazing snows and stunning cold that had gripped everything above the Hudson Highlands, and seemed to be on the way to the city itself.

She nodded.