Winter's Tale Part 16

While scholars were returning to their nocturnal labors after meager dinners of bile and gravel, Hardesty began his researches. He was in his natural element, he knew what to do, and he moved fast because the walk in the cold had made him alert. First he went through every conceivable directory, looking for Virginia Gamely's name. He even went into the reception hall and called directory a.s.sistance to see if she had an unpublished number. Evidently, shedidn't have a telephonea"at least not in her own name. Hardesty called the police, who could not help, they said, because they were busy chasing criminals and sleeping in patrol cars under bridges, Besides, why was it their business?

Having overturned all the easy stones, he started on the boulders Since Mrs. Gamely hadn't the vaguest idea of where her daughter was, Hardesty decided to accomplish in the library what he had been unable to do at Mrs. Gamely's because she had been too busy to make a.s.sociations. He would find out about Lake of the Coheeries, and, by discovering its characteristics, deduce enough about Virginia to help him track her down. First, the atlas. But Lake of the Coheeries was not in the index, and, in the place where he knew that he had been, the map showed a strangely empty patch of green with occasional relief and a nameless river or two. The detailed maps, the official surveys, and the historical gazetteers were similarly uninformative.

Wherever he turned, he came up with a blank. The name was unrecorded. After four and a half hours of puzzlement, he quit for the night just as the library was about to close. If there was nothing about Lake of the Coheeries in this great repository, there was likely to be nothing anywhere. While he was putting on his coat in the marble reception hall, he asked the library clickera"a man so old that he looked inside-outa"if he knew of a cheap place to stay."I have limited funds," Hardesty said,"and I'm looking for someplace that's simple, clean, and inexpensive. I don't need a bathroom in my room."

"Who has a bathroom in the room?" asked the old man, whose job was to press a clicker every time someone walked by. (It had been a long tradition at the library and could not be abandoned, and he didn't know how to do anything else.) "The bathroom's another room. It can't be in the same room unless it's right in the middle like a big box, and they don't got that."

"That's right," said Hardesty."Good thinking. What I mean is that I don't need a private bathroom, connected to my room."

"How about sharing a room, sort of?" asked the old man.

"What do you mean, *sort of?"

"What I mean is that the Widow Endicott takes in boarders."

"More than one to a room?"

"Not exactly, but it's cheap. And it's clean. You look like strong young man."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"The Widow Endicott has got certain appet.i.tes. She makes certain demands. Understand?"

"What's she like?" Hardesty asked.

"What's she like? Oh Lordy! What she is like! If only she'd been around when I was able."

"I might as well look at the place," Hardesty said."Where is it?"

"Yeah. You might as well look at the place. You wouldn't want to disappoint a poor widow, would ya? Very kind of you. It's on Second Avenue, way downtown. I don't know what street crosses it but it's near the old Coheeries Theater."

"The what theater?" Hardesty shouted.

"The Coheeries Theater. They don't call it that anymore, but I remember when they used to have stage plays there. Now they use it for wrestling, dance shows, and vaudeville."

"What do you know about the theater?"

"In general?"

"The Coheeries Theater."

"Just what I told you."

"Do you know why it was called that?"

"Let me see. Why was it called... I dunno. I never thought about it. Maybe it's a kind of clam or something, and when the curtain went up on the playsa"Shakespearea"it was like a clamsh.e.l.l opening."

"Thanks," said Hardesty, and was off into the winter night to see what he could find out about the place from the place itself.

The marquee of the Coheeries Theater had written upon it the words "Lucha Libre," and all the stores for ten blocks around were boarded up, though diagonally across the avenue was the Widow Endicott's boardinghouse, the very sight of which made Hardesty's heart jump with fear and curiosity. Even if she turned out, in fact, to be a hag, the house itself was magnificent. Candles burned in thewindows, the bra.s.s shone like gold, and the eaves and trim were kept as if the place were a national monument.

The theater had seen much better days. Forty people sat in the front rows, eating shish kabab or hot pretzels and awaiting the wreck of vaudeville, which had been resurrected for those too poor to have a television set. After picking his way over pools of sticky litter and through drifts of spilled popcorn, Hardesty took a seat in the middle of the house. Just as he looked up, the lights dimmed and the curtain was raised. He could see that the once-elegant dome and walls were covered with murals and scrollwork. But it was too dark to make out details, and he contented himself with watching the show. For the lighting, though more than half a century old, cut out all the world except the velvety dream beyond the footlights. The darkness popped with remembered silver flashes, and the colored gels and beams were as fresh as the face of a young girl who has been out in the snow.

First came two comedians. Their jokes were in Yiddish though their audience was in Spanish; their toupees were of a material that resembled orange excelsior; and they went through their routineswith closed eyes.

Then came a bicycle act during which a frightfully skinny Sicilian rode a bicycle around the stage for about five minutes. When the booing became too much for him to bear, he screwed up his features in pain and determination, and tried to stand on his head on the seat. It had been enough for him just to peddle, for he was in truth not very good at riding a bicycle. But when he tried to stand on his head, he lost control of his vehicle, and he and it flew over the ap.r.o.n into an empty row of seats.

Next came a well-worn group called The Singing Cuc.u.mbers. How they had managed to stay out of the salad for three-quarters of a century was a mystery of considerable grandeur. In cuc.u.mber costumes, straw boaters, canes, spats, and pencil mustaches, they sang three songsa""The Mice Made a Break for Freedom," "Beethoven's Nephew," and "The Boer War Triangle."

Despite their incapacities, these touching, persistent, third-ratea"seventh-ratea"theatrical people strove to excel. They thought that they were artists: they said so on their tax forms and in busstations in northeastern Delaware, and they almost had it right, for they were not artists, but art. They were in themselves like sad songs or revealing portraits. Something about them was terribly moving. They never gave up. They never could see very clearly beyond their driven ambitions. And they had never figured out that their every move made them part of a sad tableau.

Last on the bill was a dancing act. Three odd young girls who called themselves The Spielers danced in wooden shoes and green homespun dresses. A card on a tripod identified them as Little Liza Jane, Dolly, and Bosca, the dark girl. They jumped and twirled in strange jigs, and seemed not to notice that they were onstage in a theater. They loved to dance. They danced with each other three at a time. They smiled. And in the end they gave three lovely and innocent bows.

The lights came up before the wrestling, giving Hardesty a chance to study the murals. A dozen scenes from Lake of the Coheeries were clearly depicted in shady old oils. Here was the lake in summer, spring, and fall, ice-covered in winter. Here was the village, under the stars, in the snow, or surrounded by somnolent crops. Here were iceboating, and a strange gazebo on the lake. Here were village girls, farmers, and a horse pulling a sled. But in the dome of the theater was the most unusual picture of them all. It showed an island in the lake, at night. Rising from it was a whitened column of stars, as if the Milky Way had dipped down in imitation of a rainbow.

What Hardesty next saw pushed him down in his seat and made him tremble. Engraved around the dome in letters that now were so dirty that they could hardly be seen, were the words,"For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone?"

The wrestling was half over by the time Hardesty made his way out of the theater. Just before the exit was a plaque stating that the Coheeries Theater had been donated to the city by Isaac Penn. This was a lead, though undoubtedly blind, that he would have to follow. But he wanted to sleep, and the nearest place was the boardinghouse diagonally across the street.

The coincidence of inscriptions could not possibly have beenmore than just that. Certainly the perfectly just city would never arise on these unclean ruins, not in the lap of an industrial civilization known primarily for civilization in the breach, not in a noisy inhumane city fashioned in gray after the image of a machine, nor from amid the soot-covered spires, the ice-choked riverways, and the endless avenues of careless war-torn architecture. No. Everything he knew told him that it could never be so. It was merely a coincidence, and would not keep him from traveling on. Still, he was dazed. And he was putty in the hands of the Widow Endicott.

SHE was a red-haired beauty, an Amazon, almost as big as the marble statue of Diana in the park at Winky's Hill. Ten husbands had died in her bed, so she started a boardinghouse for young men just in from the country. These she shuffled around among several rooms that adjoined her own, and among the baths, showers, and saunas in which she kept them ready at a moment's notice to pop in and copulate. She was perfect and insatiable. Each breast was a marvel. Her forest of red pubic hair was soft, fragrant, and deep. She was as white as ivory but glossed in red because of her red hair and the rhythmic undercolor of her fine skin as the blood beat through it.

She liked that Hardesty was trim and strong, and she put him close by. From the way that she looked at him, he suspected that he would be making love to her soon. He went to his room, undressed, and got into bed. When he was half asleep, protesting in a borderless meditation the notion that New York might be anything but a crowded tool chest on a slag heap of materialism, the connecting doors to the widow's room flew open.

He walked carefully through a small pa.s.sageway into her bedchamber, which was entirely white. Even the floor was white, and there were no windows, only a skylight. In a small fireplace a cherry basket of glowing coals rested on the bars of an iron grate, pulsing like a Pittsburgh open hearth. The Widow Endicott was redolent in her white bed in the light of the seething coals. She was undulating as she lay back, her hips propped up on a big pillow. Hardesty saw beneath the white silky skin an outline of delicate ribs. She was an essay in red; her deep auburn hair, her lips just slightly apart, thetips of her b.r.e.a.s.t.sa"as short, slight, and red as a scarlet brush stronkea"and her red pubic hair gleaming like a Pacific forest. Though Har-desty wished that he were a painter, so that he might paint her, paint her is not what he did.

Hardesty's useless struggles at the library the evening before were well compensated twenty-four hours later, after he had spent most of the day recovering. Though there was not a single reference to Lake of the Coheeries, and the word Coheeries itself probably da not exist in any of the books in the library, entries for Isaac Perm filled several card drawers, and Hardesty soon found himself in the Penn archives, surrounded not only by books but by pamphlets broadsides, photographs, letters, and ma.n.u.scripts. A large number of letters and telegrams had been sent via Hudson or by hand. The Penns, a family a.s.sociated with newspapers, whaling, and the arts (there was even a young collection on Jessica Penna"a Broadway actress of whom Hardesty had heard), maintained a summer house in a place that was never identified as anything but "L of C."

Enough material rested in the archives to absorb several scholars in long and productive careers, but Hardesty was drawn mainly to the photographs, of which there were thousandsa"all black and whitea"in the powerful, communicative style of the nineteenth century, when sensibilities born of painting contributed to photography what photography itself would soon help to obliterate.

These pictures were chronologically arranged in bra.s.s-hinged alb.u.ms of varnished cherrywood. Each turning of a page revealed a photograph with a key in which the subjects were identified and the setting was explained. If one were to have judged the turn of the century solely by this record, one might have thought that it was a time devoted primarily to rowboats, toboggans, snow shoes, tennis racquets, oceangoing yachts, and outdoor furniture. The Penns loved to take pictures of themselves as they played sports, or sat in the summer sun looking over the sea. Although quite a few shots were of Isaac Penn at public functions or in the midst of his staff on The Sun, and some were of Beverly playing the piano, Jack doing an experiment with his chemistry set, or Jayga standing in an imperial pose, arms akimbo, in front of her stove, most were of the family together.

They were gathered in the snow, picnicking in high meadows, racing horses, rowing in the August heat, or walking along the beach at the end of daya"sunburnt, healthy, listening to the slowly unfurling waves.

As the history of the Penns unfolded for Hardesty, welling up from the past with surprising vitality, he noticed two things espeially- Two changes were unexplained among the many changes that were to be expected: after all, from his perspective in the future, Hardesty was not surprised that the infant Harry quickly grew until (in two hours) he was in command of a regiment; or by the staccato freezing and unfreezing of the lake; or when (from one wooden alb.u.m to another) lovely little Willa became lean and, yet, voluptuous, in a way that reached out to Hardesty across a good part of the century. From his G.o.dlike perspective, he was able to gloss over minor inconsistencies and not worry about people who appeared and disappeared, or changes in posture, decor, and fashion. He was, after all, floating in a lake of a hundred eventful years.

But the archivists had done such a good job that when they faltered Hardesty wondered why. The inconsistencies which stayed with him were that Beverly seemed always to be in a stronger light than anyone else (some of the pictures betrayed an aura that not even the chroniclers had noticeda"much less those in the scene), and that someone appeared for a short time in one of the cold and snowy years immediately preceding the Great War, and remained unidentified. He looked neither like the Penns, nor like a servant, nor like a member of the upper cla.s.ses. He had a rough, solid, workingman's manner, and one could tell even from a photograph that he spoke English the way the Irish did, that he was strong, and that he was good with tools. His burly hands were not made for a pen or a piano. He might have been the foreman of The Sun's mechanics, the keeper of their farms in Amagansett, or the captain of one of Isaac Penn's merchantmena"but he wasn't, because he was often dressed like a dandy, he always stood near Beverly, and, in one picture, he had put his arms around her with a tenderness that caused Hardesty to stare transfixed at the photograph for fifteen minutes. Hardesty felt that this man's affection, like Willa's coming into womanhood, was able almost to burn through the pages. It was far more than affection that moved him. It was love. And then Hardesty discovered the strangest seriesof images. A somber wedding, with Beverlya"hardly able to standa"supported on the man's arm. A long string of photographs of an island in the lake, bare and trembling in winter, almost indistinguishable from the snow-covered ice.

In none of the photographs was the stranger identified. Underneath his silhouette in the key to each picture in which he appeared was simply a question mark. Who was he? The meticulous archivists did not know, and apologized for not being able to explain him. A note attached to the last binder said that the living members of the Penn family had refused to comment on their photographic history, or, for that matter, even to review the collection.

Hardesty studied the interloper's face. He liked it. He liked it very much, and he was moved by the half-unnamed couple who simply disappeared, and who, apparently, would be forgotten for all time.

But he did find what he was looking for, more or less. Here and there, perched on a haystack or ensconced in the upper scroll of a horse-drawn sled, were Gamelysa"healthy yeomen, children, local people of the lake, who obviously knew the Penns and spent time with them. Though the Penns seemed to have left Lake of the Coheeries, distintegrated, and been frozen in place within their own dynastic archives, Hardesty decided to seek them out, in the hope that Virginia Gamely had done so, too.

AS great as the city was in nearly all respects, it had one unaccountable and unforgivable failing. For the many many millions of people, there were only two major newspapers. True, one could buy ten or twelve pages of day-old news in any language of the world and in any alphabet, and hundreds of stations crowded the electronic spectrum, like the bands of a coral snake, but the population as a whole was regretfully polarized: one followed either The Sun or The Ghost.

There was a Morning Ghost, and an Evening Ghost (more correctly: The New York Ghost, Morning Edition; and The New York Ghost, Evening Edition), and there were The New York Morning Whale, and The New York Evening Sun. Their rivalry straddled both editions, dusk and dawn. Anyone native to the city knew this apposition asreadily as night and day, light and dark, or fat and thin. But Hardesty did not. So when he came to a newsstand on an empty street corner, a lighthouse amid a sea of swirling blue snow, he was surrised to discover that The Sun was indeed still in the hands of the Penn family, and that Harry Penna"infant turned regimental commandera"was its editor and publisher. He went down to Printing House Square at ten o'clock, a.s.suming that at that hour a newspaper would be in the middle of a sprint for the deadline.

In fact, it was sprinting so hard that no one noticed Hardesty or would answer any, of his questions. For two hours, he stayed in the middle of The Sun's gla.s.sed-in courtyard, watching the snow brush against the transparent roof many stories above as hundreds of reporters, copy boys, messengers, worried editors, and inky printers crisscrossed around him heading from one door to another or up and down the open stairs that led to each of the floors looking over the enclosed court. But then, at midnight, everything stopped except the pressesa"which began to rumble on the bottom floors, like the engines of a ship, as if they were not merely stamping out impressions, but moving the building ahead in a turbulent and foggy sea. Hardesty went to the city room, on the third floor, where he stopped the first person he met. This was, in fact, Praeger de Pinto, themanaging editor.

"Excuse me," Hardesty said."I'm trying to find someone who came originally from the Lake of the Coheeries, where the Penns once had a summer house. It may have been foolish for me to have come here, but I have no other connections and no other way to locate her. I would like to ask Harry Penn if he knows where she is, or for suggestions about how to find her."

"Are you looking for Virginia Gamely?" Praeger asked.

"That's exactly who I'm looking for."

"She works here."

"Then I've found her."

"But she's not here now. We just put The Whale to bed, and she's on The Sun. She comes in at six in the morning."

"My name is Hardesty Marratta. I was on the Polaris.... I have a letter from her mother."

"I can give it to her."

"Her mother made me promise to do it myself."

Praeger introduced himself and invited Hardesty into his office on the floor above (to which they ascended via a cast-iron spiral staircase that pierced the ceiling) to talk about what Hardesty had seen in Lake of the Coheeries. Praeger had been interested in the place from the time that Virginia had first brought it up and then conspired with Jessica Penn not to mention it ever again. He was interested in Hardesty's descriptions, both for their content and because he recognized that, like Virginia, Hardesty had a gift for language."I don't know what it is about Lake of the Coheeries," Praeger said,"or even if Lake of the Coheeries does, in fact, exist. But everyone who pa.s.ses through it seems to acquire a way with words that I like very much. Maybe we'll have some seminars up there (if we can get to it), or bottle the water for our coolers."

They spoke for several hours, touching upon a dozen or more subjects and discovering that their views were remarkably similar. They were weary and relaxed; they both loved the strain of winter; they enjoyed one another's sharp conversation; and they got along extremely well, except for one thing. They disagreed about the nature of the city itself.

Hardesty was in no mood for toleration of its numerous and outstanding urban deformities, and would not forgive what he took to be the unnecessary roughness of its inhabitants and the rigid way that it was laid out, architected, built, fixed, and maintained. He hated it as if he were about to love ita"unforgivingly, irrationally, sadly. Though they were beautiful and magnetic, the deep-throated whistles that shot through the snow and rattled the windows of The Sun made him uneasy, and the thought of the endless internal horizons incorporated into the streets, bends, alleys, and roosts made him extremely uncomfortable.

Praeger had seen this before."You'll soon be forever in love with the things you now despise," he said.

"That's what you think," returned Hardesty."I'm on my way to Europe. I'm not going to be here long enough to fall in love with anything at all."

"The anarchy will hold you."

"How could it? It's what I detest the most."

"You know that it isn't anarchy at all, and that, even if it is, it contains all the possibilities you seek. And you must know, as well, that the very fact the city survives and remains on its feet implies an equilibrium, which, in turn, implies the presence of a high and opposing force for each category of degradation."

"I don't see them. Do you?"

"Only rarely. But when I do, I can see that the balances are maintained. I can see traces of a perfect age, in the way that veins of the roughest ore can lead to gold."

"And what if the ugliness and the horror wear you down until you are unable to appreciate what you hope for, should it arrive."

"So much the better. I love the risk. I like it thata"try as I mighta"the outcome is hardly up to me. The plans for the city were drawn on the same table as the plans for war. It promises nothing, and yet it can be inimitably generous. You should stay awhile and get some idea of how it works. Listen to the ship whistles. When you hear them, summer and winter, they become a song, a message. I always think that they're saying, *Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.'

They parted uneasily, because Hardesty resented that Praeger had predicted a change in him, and Praeger resented having had to do it. What did Praeger care, anyway, about what Hardesty thought? But he promised to introduce Hardesty to Virginia the next day at four, just after The Sun was put to bed.

Hardesty walked five miles through a driving snowstorm to the Hotel Lenore, a tall tower in midtown that caught the snow against its high gla.s.s sides and sent it falling in bushels like whitewater dashing through a flume. The streets had been as empty as the prairie, and while they were white it had seemed as if the possibilities of which Praeger had spoken were indeed present in the hot and icy s.p.a.ces in which the city's wars of equilibrium were waged.

The night manager gave Hardesty the highest room in the hotel. Because he had found Virginia, and could leave New York in a day or two, Hardesty felt that he could afford the astronomical price. He had left The Sun at one in the morning. Now it was so far in themiddle of the night that the clocks had quit, and time seemed to have been obliterated by the raging storm.

When he arrived in his room on the 120th floor, he went to the window and peered into the skein of wind-snarled white ebbing and flowing against the gla.s.s. This was a frustrating, hard, unforgiving unkind city, strong on suffering, punishment, and murderous weather. Its climate and population were a scythe that swept relentlessly until even the strong fell before it, and the weak in their great numbers vanished from the streets forever and died unremembered in the cold and dark. Standing on the 120th floor, he could see nothinga"and he took that to be the signature of the city.

Nonetheless, Hardesty was cheered when he discovered that there was a sauna in the bathroom. Soon after he stepped in and closed the cedar door, the heat began to come up and a bank of sunlights blazed. After trudging across the arctic boweries, he was delighted to find himself in a dry desert, but he was so cold that it took him forty-five minutes to work up a sweat.

The next day, he would deliver the letter to Virginia Gamely, and, if he were lucky, board a liner that would charge the ice and break from the harbor. Then its whistle blasts would be in his favor, not against him. But they seemed not to be against Praeger, certainly, who thought they were like an organ in a church, commanding attention, calling forth those emotions that shook the body like a reed. Hardesty heard the deep whistles even in the desert on the 120th floor, at three, or four, or five, or whatever o'clock it was in the morning. How is it, he thought, that the whistles are shrieking now? Can ships be leaving at this time, in the teeth of the storm? And who hears them?

Ceaseless activity, even when everyone was presumed to be asleep, suggested to him that the city did have a life of its own, and that there was indeed something underneath, slowly and methodically working its way out.

Nearly faint, he emerged from the sauna and went to the window. The storm was still raging, but, staring into it, he became aware of a glow. Straight on, it, too, must have been high in the air, and it appeared to grow stronger as the wind went mad and rocked the steel cliff in which he stood.

Then, as if the snow were fog and the hotel were a ship, a s.p.a.ce opened up as if to accommodate motion, and a lighted tower came into view suspended in the maelstrom and seemingly independent of the ground. It was the top of an old skysc.r.a.pera"floodlighted in blue, white, and silver. Though the snow obscured it at times with a transparent curtain, it always managed to shine through, as bright as a halo. Toward morning, when dawn made the blizzard gray and the world was clouded over, the tower was lost.

THE morning was as clear as gla.s.s. Hardesty went to the window and surveyed a forest of high towers slicing up the wind that came down from Canada herding the color blue before it like a vast number of sheep. On distant bridges, golden streams of glinting micaa"cars in the morning suna"moved to and from the city. And the sisters of the ships he had heard in the storm, ships as big as cities used to be, placidly crossed the wave-etched harbor, sliding over high whitecaps like a hot iron on linen.

In the streets, people were jumping like puppets, racing around at a speed that astonished even them. On those clear icy days when the full moon could not even wait for the dark, and circled the sun in the sky, they danced in what they did, they were like racehorses in the paddock, they acted like people who have discovered something great, and, in justifying the saying that New York is a city which dies and rises the way other cities go to bed at night and get up in the morning, they made the long lean island of Manhattan ring and tremble like an unsheathed sword.

Hardesty took nearly the whole day to push through these lunatics on his way to Printing House Square. They would give neither him nor anyone else an inch. Lines of traffic bolted through red lights. Bakery trucks raced on the main avenues at 125 miles per hour, a.s.sa.s.sinating bicyclists and pedestrians. Balkan pretzel vendors in two-foot-thick padded clothing and fleecy aviator caps charged each other with their flame-holding wagons, b.u.mping like buffalos, to lay claim to a corner. With attache cases strapped to their backs, stockbrokers in three-piece suits raced in life or death agony on crosscountry skis from Riverside Drive to Wall Street. On one bustlingavenue, the second story of each commercial building on both sides of the street for five miles was the home of a karate dojo. Hardesty walked past these during the lunch hour, and heard several hundred thousand combative screams, as figures in white sailed through the air, legs c.o.c.ked and arms outstretched, like Russian dancers. There were fires blazing on every corner, mortal arguments on each block, robberies in commission, buildings attacked by squads of devilish wreckers, and buildings a.s.sembled by construction workers who rode single cables until they disappeared into the sky. Hardesty found it difficult to get downtown and stay the same. The city wanted fuel for its fires, and it reached out with leaping tongues of gravity and flame to pull people in, size them up, dance with them a little, sell them a suita"and then devour them.

It was late and dark by the time he reached Printing House Square, where The Sun's offices faced those of The Ghost across the way. The Ghost had large electric signs on its huge headquarters, proclaiming its success and popularity, whereas The Sun glowed gently from inside a masterpiece of neocla.s.sical architecture. Hardesty bounded up the stairs to Praeger de Pinto's office. His rapidly beating heart was whipped on even faster when he found Praeger de Pinto and Virginia sitting together on Praeger's leather couch, closely and easily enough to suggest that they were perhaps more than just comfortable with one another. Intense jealousy struck him like a missile. The agony was physical. d.a.m.n this city, where there was no justice and never would be. He knew upon seeing Virginia's eyes that this was the woman for him, and he cursed the timing of it, since he could see that she and Praeger.... But then he thought that maybe he was just imagining it, for when Praeger stood to greet him it appeared as if the distance between Praeger and Virginia on the couch had been at least a foot. A foot and a half, he thought, full of hope, perhaps even two feet. Hardesty decided that this lovely unselfconscious woman with long black hair and supremely intelligent eyes, would soon be his wifea"Praeger or no Praeger."I'll crush him like a tsetse fly," Hardesty said out loud, without knowing it.

"Who?" asked Praeger. Virginia was curious as well, and already smitten.

"Craig d.i.n.ky," Hardesty blurted out, fast on his feet.

"Oh," said Praeger."We all would like to do that. But what brought you into the fold so soon?"

"I saw today's Ghost. Infuriating."

Virginia smiled. From the way Hardesty had looked at her, the slight shake in his voice, and his unhappiness, she knew that he had fallen in love. This showed a certain weakness of character, yes, but it was a commitment she could not ignore. Though she tried to hang on to the steep slopes down which she felt herself sliding, after just a few minutes she gave up entirely. Still, she did not want to be rasha"she had a child to consider, because she had been rash oncebefore.

Praeger de Pinto, who had always been and would ever be in love with Jessica Penn, stepped back slowly from the awkward conversation and the not-quite-regular breathing, and watched Hardesty and Virginia discover one another while the shifts changed on the two papers and Printing House Square filled with crowds of pressmen, copy boys, and clerical workers treading down the snow.

Before Hardesty delivered Mrs. Gamely's letter, he spoke of the Polaris and of how, by accident, he had come to Lake of the Coheeries. As he spoke, he could feel Virginia's love for the landscape he was describing. He was glad that it was winter, when love and ambition flare in the cold. Perhaps if she had not been framed by the dark gla.s.s behind her and the snowy square dazzling with the lights of The Ghost, he would not have been able to talk to her in a way that almost trumpeted his intentionsa"that is, to everyone except Virginia, who valued them so much that she could not be sure of the obvious.

After a while, they looked up and discovered that Praeger was gone.

"How long do you think he's been out of the room?" Virginia asked with a smile.

"I don't know," Hardesty replied."But let's have dinner."

"I have to feed the baby," she said."Mrs. Solemnis likes to leave by six."

Hardesty's confidence left him a lot faster than it had come. Again, he felt physical pain.