Winter's Tale Part 27

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 pa.s.s 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 threea"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 s.e.xy 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 herlong 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. Hardestv 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed him, G.o.d 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 pa.s.sage of her thighs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 b.u.mped 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 moonlighta"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 ma.s.s 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 hors.e.m.e.n.

The first wave broke over New York as the wind came up and made the Hudson into an impa.s.sable 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 fromtheir 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 starteda"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 mayora"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 hehimself 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 pa.s.sing 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 earned 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 cheerrully in his Madison Square Irish."Three over easy, two very sqwunchy and wet, like newborn wildebeests wrapped up in the amnioc, and one lone hardboileda"the Aztec G.o.d of the sun. Ya folia? 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 de-mand 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 knowna"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, leanagainst the object of his diatribe, and smile as the stranger pushed per 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.sumed 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 bas.e.m.e.nts at four in the morning mete out to the people who are already there His only hope was to frighten his a.s.sailants 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.

"Gentlemen!" he blurted out as he was powerfully lifted into the air, but could think of no further appeal.

Amazed by the absolute steadiness with which he was raised, he imagined that the thugs who had him were Olympic weight lifters. He turned his head a few degrees in each direction, but was unable to see their feet. Nor could he hear their breathing. Nor could he feel their hands.

Though it was not entirely beyond the range of the local criminals to approach their craft with such refinement, it was not likely, either. Peter Lake tried to look over his shoulder, but he was held as firmly as if he were a kitten grasped by the scruff of its neck. He cleared his throat, and was about to address his tormentors once again, when he saw that he had begun to move very rapidly across the room. The acceleration was such that he felt the wind whistling in his ears, and he was pointed at the far wall. It came at him so fast that he hadn't even time to blink (much less protest) before his head smashed right into it.

But, rather than being killed, he went right through, with a gust of air that blew his hair back against his skull. Then he was in another cellar, still accelerating, heading for another wall. Expecting the worst, he closed his eyes. But again he went right through, and was still picking up speed. Soon he learned to keep his eyes open and bless the pace. Wall after wall appeared, and was pa.s.sed as if it weremere air. He was traveling so fast that he saw the bas.e.m.e.nt rooms go by as if they were frames in a motion picturea"until the walls were no longer evident.

He flew underground as fast as a jet, whistling through earth, stone, and innumerable cellars, cisterns, tunnels, wells, and, finally, graves. For, as effortlessly as if he had been flying through clear air, he was taken on a tour of all the graves of the world. Though they flickered by with such rapidity that they became no more than a beam of sullen light, he was able to examine each one separately, as if every flash of his journey were a full-scale inquest. He saw the faces and clothing of the newly buried, and he registered their expressions without emotion.

Peter Lake's eyes were the only vital part of his face as they took in the quickening images that hurtled past, and they moved with machinelike, supernatural speed, fastening precisely upon every detail, catching a glimpse and more of each of the billions that he was a.s.signed to see. The velocity and rhythm of these many lives combined into a pure and otherworldy whistle, like that of a loon in the deep forests on a still, clear night. They lay in all positions. Some were merely dust, others the ivory bones that children fear, spookishly luminescent. In unending scenes and drolleries, they clutched amulets, tools, and coins. They were buried with icons, photographs, newspaper clippings, books, and flowers. Some were in tattered shrouds and others wrapped in tape. Some had cradles of silk and wood, and many many more lay without any accoutrement in the soft or stony ground. Some he found in steel chambers, smothered under the sea, and some in great ma.s.ses, thrown one atop the other like kindling. Chains, ropes, and iron collars were as much in evidence around the neck as were pearls and gold. They were all agesa"infants, warriors with swords still stuck in their thighs, scholars who had died peaceable deaths, and Renaissance servants in red caps. As they shot past, they hesitated for an immeasurable instant to greet him. He flew over their great legions in the darkness of the ground, and his eyes kept working to take in the bearded ones, the toothless, the laughing and the insane, the worried women and the smiling, those who were profound and those who had never known more than a fish knows, the ones who had lived their lives on the iceand were still there, perfectly preserved in smooth white vaults the ones who had been washed down hot rivers and had lost everything but the tiny sparkle in the mud that betrayed their final positions.

His mouth fell open, but, still, his eyes worked. Something within him refused not to honor each one, and as if he had been born for the task, he saw and remembered each fleshless head, each whitened hand, each cavelike eye.

The graves of the world went by him with the hypnotic speed of the counterrhythms that dash from the spokes of a rushing wheel. He was unmoved, and he did not feel compa.s.sion, for he was far too busy and his eyes too darting and quick. There was much to be done. He had to know them all. And, in his mad and breathless flight, he did not miss a single one, but worked as if he had been created to be their registrara"the mechanical mole, the faithful observer, the gleaner of souls, the good workman.

LATE in the afternoon, one day in the middle of October, the light on West Fifty-seventh Street created those perfect conditions that medieval churchmen had used to elaborate upon the idea of heaven. Virginia was returning from a North River pier where she had been sent to interview a noted political exilea"who never arrived, because he had been secretly taken off his ship at sea and flown to Washington. She had several hours before she had to be home to wake the children from their nap, and had decided to do some shopping on Fifth Avenue. Abby hadn't been feeling well, probably because of the change of seasons. Mrs. Solemnis said that she was sleeping comfortably and had no fever.

Virginia needed a winter coat. Because she was tall, even for a Gamely, she took large sizes. This, combined with her deeply ingrained thriftiness, meant that she would probably have to look hard to find something decently styled, and warm enough for the Lake or the Coheeries. It had been years since she had seen her mother. Both Virginia and Hardesty knew that they would have great difficulty getting to the Coheeries, and that they might not be able to return. Hardesty was willing, in that case, to become a farmer by the lake,and pa.s.s his winters on skis, in iceboats, and skating many miles from village to village and inn to inn. They planned to go in December or January, if conditions were right. They would bundle the children in wool, down, and fur, and take the train early one morning when the smoke from the few chimneys that still existed stood skinny and straight in the cold air, like undertakers waiting outside a church. These, at least, were their plans. But since they had planned in this fashion for many winters and had never been able to leave, the plans seemed like dreams. Every winter, they were going to go back to the Coheeries, but something had always occurred to force them to put off their move for yet another year.

Pa.s.sing Carnegie Hall, Virginia noticed a crowd filing in for a concert, and saw on several billboards that the famous orchestra of Canadians P. (his full name) was going to play the Amphibological Whimsey Dances of Mozart. Because it was rather hard to tell what was what on the mixed bill, it might have been the Divertimento in C Minor of Mozart, and the Amphibological Whimsey Dances of Minos-crams Sampson. That seemed more reasonable. She was about to continue walking, when, right in front of her, as fast and round as a ball of quicksilver, the fat slit-eyed thing that they called Mr. Cecil Wooley bounced up the steps of Carnegie Hall. Undoubtedly, she thought, Jackson Mead's quintet did not include in its repertory such things as the Amphibological Whimsey Dances, and young Mr. Wooley, soft for lighter forms, had weaseled away to attend this concert. There was no mistaking his truant stride. He had the air of one of those schoolboys whose eyes bounce back and forth in rhapsodic perjury as he tries to pretend that he has walked into a women's steambath because he neglected to read the sign.

She dashed into the lobby. He had just bought his ticket, and was heading for the balconies. She approached the ticket seller."You see that fat thing?" she asked, pointing to Cecil Mature as he was l.u.s.t barely swallowed up into a doorway."Give me a seat right behind him."

"But miss," the ticket man protested."I'd have to give you seat forty-six in balcony Q. That's the worst seat in the house. Unless your mother was an owl and your father was a hawk, you wouldn't be able to hear or see a thing."

"What was that?" Virginia asked."Speak up!" "Oh," the man in the box office said, and issued her the ticket She raced up the carpeted stairs, with Cecil panting several flights in the lead. At the top, Virginia paused to let Cecil take his seat. Then she went up and around, and took her own seat behind him, unnoticed. Were it not for half a dozen sound-asleep policemen, Virginia and Cecil would have had the upper balcony entirely to themselves. She looked down, and put her hand over her chest in fright. From where she was sitting, the stage was nothing more than a little fan-shaped cookie crawling with black and white ants.

The lights dimmed, and Cecil Mature popped up and down in joyous antic.i.p.ation. After he opened a little white carton that he had taken from his coat pocket, Virginia was overcome with the aroma of lobster Cantonese. As the concert began, and the ba.s.soons, piccolos, and snare drums started to play (to the cheers of the Mozart and Minoscrams Sampson devoteesa"and the police, who clapped automatically in their sleep), Cecil Mature began to eat the lobster Cantonese, using his fingers to shovel it into his mouth, and his teeth to crack the sh.e.l.ls.

Virginia was soon swept up in the sad amphibological harmonies. This music was like riding gentle waves, or motoring through the Cotswolds. It lifted and raised its hearers as gently as if they had been the wounded coming from war. It was very strange stuff, and Cecil Mature loved it. He must have been devoted to it, Virginia thought, the way her mother was to the works of A. P. Clarissa. Except that Cecil was young and somewhat rowdy, and every once in a while he would toss his arm into the air and say,"Play that music. Play it! Yeah!"

As the concert was ending, Virginia went into the hallway so that she might run across Cecil accidentally. When the lights came on, Cecil flashed around the corner."Mr. Cecil Wooley!" she exclaimed, just as if she were surprised, and had known him all her life.

He went dead in his tracks, shut his squinty eyes, and clenched his teeth."How do you do," he said in evident pain.

Virginia went on."What a surprise that you like Minoscrams Sampson. He's certainly my favorite composer. You know, he livednot far from where I grew up, in a big windmill on the sh.o.r.e of the lake, and every day...."

Before Cecil knew what was happening, she had captured him and was towing him along East Fifty-seventh Street. He could not protest that he had to get home (or wherever he had to go), because she was chattering away about this and that, and wouldn't let go of his arm. In truth, he was very proud to be seen with such a tall beauty, and she could have taken him anywhere she wanted. He blushed and blinked in pride and embarra.s.sment. It was as if he and she were on a date. All the executives walking home in the dusk would see them, and since Fifty-seventh Street was the street on which to be seen, what could be better? Thinking that they might take him and Virginia for husband and wife, he felt a thrill of pleasure.

Virginia snapped her fingers."I know!" she said, in response to a question that had not been posed."Let's have an ice cream soda in the bar of the Hotel Lenore. They make a special ginger chocolate cream that my children love. You might want to try it."

Cecil stopped where he was, and shook his head from side to side.

"What's the matter, Mr. Wooley?"

"I can't," he said, gravely.

"You can't what?"

"I can't. We're not allowed to go to a bar, to have ice cream sodas, to eat chocolate, to talk with strangers, or to be alone at night away from the ship."

"Who said?"

"Jackson Mead said."

"Does he have to know?" Virginia asked.

"I couldn't."

The Hotel Lenore had an overelegant bar where those who didn't know any better went to feel important, but they made the best ice crearn sodas anywhere.

"Look at that beautiful dame with that fat slit-eyed thing," one of the bartenders said to another."What does a knockout like her want with a ball of India rubber like him?"

"I dunno," answered the other bartender."Some dames like a crazy salad with their meat, if you know what I mean."

Since, perched on a bar stool, Cecil looked like a memo * sphere atop a victory column, which was architecturally correct 1 had a measure of confidence that he would not otherwise have en-joyed. Nonetheless, he was dreadfully ill-at-ease.

"Two chocolate ginger cream sodas," Virginia said,"and very, very, very heavy on the special ingredient." The special ingredient was rum.

A $65 ice cream soda should be served without delay, and they were, the two of them, all $130 worth, as big as buckets, in Baccarat vats with platinum spoons and gold straws. Cecil was beside himself He thanked Virginia, and grabbed the straw, but after half a draw he turned to her and said,"It tastes good, real good, but there's something in it that reminds me of tetrahydrozaline."

"That's the ginger," Virginia said, and touched her lovely lips to the gold straw.

At first Cecil hesitated, but then he set to work. Whereas Virginia took little dainty bee-wisps of the iced chocolate, Cecil would have been useful when Mussolini drained the Pontine marshes. Like a first-cla.s.s rotary pump, he hummed with the pleasure of the work, and, even though the Baccarat vats in which the Lenore served sodas had special sumps to prevent the final "Aarchh... Roooch!" when the bottom was reached, Cecil's velocity rendered their design moot, and the "Aarchh... Roooch!" sounded like a volcanic pumice shower. He leaned back a little and swung his glazed eyes at Virginia. He had drained a gallon in five minutes, but it was the quart of rum that had glazed his eyes. Now Virginia had him.

The little bee-wisps of rum had given to Virginia a beneficent fuzzy glare. She was just enough out of phase with the rest of the world to be able to look Cecil in the eye and elicit from him all that he wanted to say, though she didn't really look him in the eye, since it was harder to see his eyes than it would have been to see what the soldiers of an enemy machine-gun squad were reading inside their pillbox.

"There was some stuff in that soda, wasn't there," he asked, accusingly.

"A quart of rum," she answered.

"A quart and a half," said the bartender, in pa.s.sing.

"G.o.d!" said Cecil, angry for a moment."Why'd you have to do hat?" He pounded his fist against the air."It doesn't matter. No bye, no goodbyes."

"What does that mean?" Virginia asked.

"I dunno. Sometimes I used to have a gla.s.s of wine, or a gla.s.sof beer, with dinner. I found that it helped me appreciate the food, cleared the palate, aided digestion, and made me drunk. But this! I dunno what I'm going to do. How long does it take for a quart and a half of rum to go away?"

"Half an hour."

"Oh, that's not so bad. But the thing is, I feel so vulnerable. What if Pearly came in? Peter Lake's not here to protect me." His eyes went all misty and his mouth cranked up into an abysmal expression of primal sadness.

"Who was Peter Lake?" Virginia wanted to know. The name sounded vaguely familiar to her.

Tears now ran down Cecil's cheeks, and he regained control only after a few minutes."I remember those days," he said."We used to live in water tanks and on the rooftops. Sometimes, we would hire ourselves out under false names and work in a forge or a machine shop. They couldn't begin to touch us for quality work. Mootfowl knows more about that stuff than anyone in the world, and he taught us. We worked whenever we wanted. Sometimes I'd do small tattoo jobs, and we carried everything we had in little stonemason's bags. The weather was great. Always clear skies. And, if it did rain, we'd go see one of Peter Lake's girlfriends. We went to Minnie's a lot. I would always sleep in the other room and listen to the springs squeak when Peter Lake and Minnie were in the bed. It was all right. If I got too jealous, I'd go to the market. By the time I got back and started cooking, they'd be finished anyway, and we'd all sit around and eat squash. I used to cook squash good.

"As far as I was concerned, we coulda just had squash, all the time.. But Peter Lake wanted roast beef, duck, and beer, so we used to go to places to eat. That's where the trouble started, when Pearly threw the apple at him."

Listening to this was very confusing for Virginia. It didn't sound contemporary. And though Cecil was only an adolescent, it did soundtrue. She wanted to find out more. But as she was about to question' him further, the doors of the Lenore were flung open by costumed lackeys, and in came Craig Binky with a huge party of hangers-and sycophants.

They made their entrance as if they had been following operatic stage directions: "From stage left, enter Craig Binky and a group of young aristocratic rogues who have returned from the hunt, flushed with good cheer." Surrounding Virginia and Cecil, they filled up all the nearby stools and banquettes, and began to order, in French, each and every $250 dish and $150 drink.

"I said to the Prime Minister," Craig Binky declaimed to no one in particular,"what your country needs is the Binky touch. With more than half a billion people, no natural resources, and a per capita income of thirty-five dollars per annum, you might just wake up one morning to discover that you're in deep trouble.

"There I was, me, Craig Binky, talking to the leader of all those millions! And do you know what he wanted to know? I'll tell you. He was most interested in hearing from me how to open a numbered account in Zurich. Can you beat that! The man was a saint. With all his country's domestic problems, he wanted to aid tiny little Switzerland!"

Virginia tugged at Cecil until she maneuvered him out of the Lenore. This was not easy, and he continued to speak even though she was unable to hear him. Only when she got him on the sidewalk did she again pick up the thread of his confession.

"... and since it was that way, I had to leave. Then he disappeared. It was a surprise to us all, since Jackson Mead thought that this one was going to be the eternal rainbow, the real one that had no end. And then he and the horse just vanished. I told them that Peter Lake knew the city better than anyone. If he wanted to lay low, he could do it for as long as he liked.

"And it's useless now, without him.... It just isn't time yet, I guess.

"I loved him," said Cecil, not with tears, but with certainty."He was like a brother to me. He protected me. And he never knew who he was."

HARDESTY watched the fog blow in on a whistling wind that tugged it into white streamers and pushed apart the silent ma.s.ses from which they were drawn. Because San Francisco is surrounded by a cold sea, when the ocean winds decide to put the city to bed and reclaim it for the North Pacific, they do so without challenge, and hurl it into an oblivion of blue sky, white fog, and wind lines etched in silence across the bay.

From a fiftieth-floor hotel room, he looked over the city of his birth almost in its entirety. He could see his house on Presidio Heights, the highest thing around, as white as a glacier, the study tower easily visible against the green Presidio forests behind it. As the fog captured it whole, left it high and dry, or floated it upon the white tide so that it looked like a house in the air, Hardesty wondered if the gentle clouds that part.i.tioned s.p.a.ce and time were compa.s.sionate as well, and would let him look in to see his father and himself seated at the long wood table, turning the pages of an old book while his father explained its intricacies. Those events which have pa.s.sed, and which are the foundations of our lives, must be somewhere, he thought. They must be recapturable, even if only in a perfect world. How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth. A light went on in the tower and shone momentarily through the dark before the fog swallowed up the Marratta house for the night. Hardesty felt longing and pain, because he suspected that in the light that had winked across the fog there had been a living presence free of the constraints of time.

When Jackson Mead had spoken of the "eternal rainbow," Hardesty had been transported into the past, and could think only of the Pacific and the forests above it drenched in fog. He felt that the answer to Jackson Mead's riddle was somewhere in the pines of the Presidio, where he had spent half of his boyhood as if he had lived not in a city but in a range of isolated mountains. He had booked a flight and a room so that he might call upon his past. Except for a brief visit to his father's grave (where Evan certainly would not be),he was in San Francisco solely to go back to the Presidio, to see if by doing so he could decipher two of Jackson Mead's words.

The next day, he crossed the city, walking north in the clear sunshine until, in the forests he knew so well, the sun disappeared and fog rushed through the trees like an army of white-haired sorcerers. The fog hissed and sang like jangled and discordant harps. Shad ows and mists closed off the world behind, and Hardesty found himself in a seemingly endless grove of delicate trees. He followed the fog contrary to its course until he lost sight of the trees and the ground. After crossing a patch of soft heather, he realized that he was standing at the edge of a cliff high over the sea. The wind was white, and, though he knew where he was from the sound and spray, he could see nothing. The sea grew so loud that he had to drop to his knees so as not to lose his balance. The shrieking of the wind pushed him to the ground as if he were being beaten by the waves. Because the flat ground seemed to be turning circles in the air, he held fast to the greenery and pressed himself against the sand and heather. It seemed like a safe place, and, covered over by the fog, he fought his dizziness and exhaustion with sleep.

Hardesty Marratta had been to heaven in his dreams often enough, for they were like all the paintings that Brueghel had ever painted, combined, in searing unearthly colors that moved 360 degrees *round. But these dreams, no amateurish work to be sure, were now eclipsed as he rose quietly upward. For a while he could not see, but then the fog vanished and the air became as clear as ether. He found himself in a house of wood and gla.s.s, high over a blue lake. At first he didn't know where to go or what to do, but he was soon approached by a woman who glided to hima"flew to him, reallya" woman whose hair was graceful and elastic in the wind, as if it were made for air and motion. She stretched out her hands and led him through the golden light, sidestepping (though she did not touch the floor), to a high terrace overlooking the blue lakea"which was not so much a lake as a condition of the light. It seemed to enclose them in a dome of weightless azure that extended to the horizon and was filled with light of a different sort than its own, light that was full of gold and silver, airy, hot, and blinding. He held her hands as she floated before him, smiling, and he tried to recognize her, andto memorize her features, but she would not let him. She undid his vision with her eyes. Unlike anything that he had ever seen, they a liquid, electric, bright, uncompromising blue, and she held him transfixed while they burned into him like rays, searing and cooling at the same time.

He awoke at dusk in the darkening Presidio, lying in a cold drizzle. The fog had been shredded by the rain, and the sea was now visible below, its breakers gray, dark, and dirty. Exhausted and sore, he felt like a pair of eyes carried by bones.

Dripping wet, he pa.s.sed under the Golden Gate Bridge on his way back to the city. The toll plaza was choked with northbound traffic, the bridge itself a gently rising curve of glowing red eyes. It was as dark, wet, and bleary as Manhattan on an early winter evening after a day of sleet and rain.

Hardesty found a neglected little park just east of the tolls. In the center of a flagstone floor was a bronze head mounted on a plinth. He was so worn out that he leaned against it. He thought this was a bad place for a statue, since the park and its memorial were practically inaccessible to the public, and he went around to the front of it to see who was memorialized. Though it was already dark, Hardesty was able to make out an inscription.

1870 joseph B. strauss 7938 He skipped a paragraph of smaller letters in favor of the single line beneath it: CHIEF ENGINEER OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE.