Winter's Tale Part 33

"What are you out for?" he was asked by two men who blocked his way late that night on Eighty-seventh Street.

"I beg your pardon?" Hardesty asked in return, smiling in whatI they took to be appeas.e.m.e.nt. It was, rather, pleasure.

"I mean, what are you doing in this neighborhood? Answer it straight!" one of them said, stepping forward aggressively.

"I live here, " Hardesty said with perfect calm.

"Where!" they screamed, one after another, in a manner calculated to terrorize him.

"On Eighty-fourth."

"That's not this neighborhood, man. I asked you what you're doing here, " the bigger one demanded, pointing a finger at the ground I as he worked himself up into a rage.

"You don't think very big, do you, " Hardesty asked rhetorically. They were amazed."That's because you're pinheads. But I have a friendly feeling for pinheads, and I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm doing here. I'm here because it's gambling time, pinheads. I went home to get some cash, which I have in my left coat pocket. There's so much of it that I have to keep it in one of those thick doc.u.ment envelopes. It won't go into my wallet. The wad's too fat. Now, just to make sure you two pinheads understand what I'm talking about, I'm talking about money, thirty thousand dollars, and an extra five or ten thousand in the wallet." Hardesty actually had less than eight dollars on him, and he didn't move an inch.

His a.s.sailants blinked, and started to back away."Just leave us alone, " they said, but Hardesty came after them, his eyes narrowedwith fight.

"What's the matter? Aren't you going to rob me? Are you afraid?" he screamed. They began to run, and he ran after them. He chased them for ten blocks, screaming at the top of his lungs. When they jumped over the wall into the park, he followed, racing acrossthe moonlit snow.

The beads of sweat on their faces made them look as if they were studded with tiny dazzling moons. They turned to fire their pistols, but this made him run faster, still screaming. Then they threw their guns on the ground and ran for their lives, finally managing to disappear in the thick underbrush near the north pump house. In a mad double time, Hardesty walked out of the park and into the West Side. It was one o'clock in the morning. The city was just waking up. He figured that he would start on Broadway and rake its spine.

His first stop was a pool hall in the Eighties, a place where everyone's every gesture was calculated to convey the smoothness and certainty demanded by the game. The idea was to make others think that you were a great pool player who was trying to hide it. The real sharps had no need for any kind of pose, because those from whom they extracted their living were too busy cultivating an image to notice anything else, or, for that matter, to shoot good pool. It was de rigueur for each player to have something to wiggle in his teetha" a cigar, cigarette, pipe, or toothpicka"to accompany his use of the pool cue the way a dagger complements a sword. The studied motions of the pool players, who walked about the tables making decisions of angle and force, were appropriately geometric.

Hardesty, who arrived with not much more than wild eyes, threw off his coat, paid a five-dollar entry fee, and asked for the best man in the house. This quieted the players en ma.s.se, and they stood motionless as Hardesty was led through a grid of brightly lit tables to the corner of the room where the top shooter held court. Usually, such professionals were very fat or physically unimposing. They tended to look like burnt-out cases from West Bend who were obsessed with truck-stop waitresses. They tiptoed around the table like mushrooms on wheels, and were seldom flamboyant. The flamboyant players were the fakes who wanted to scare off big bets because they didn't dare take them.

The top player here, however, was not only flamboyant, he was a huge rail-splitter type at least six and a half feet tall, dressed in a tuxedo and a fancy shirt with small diamond studs. His was the kind of face which, when attached to a large frame, made even a man like Hardesty (who was no midget himself) feel like something the size of a navy bean. This fellow had vast waves of swept-back blond hair which, along with his forward-looking bone structure and wildly confident expression, made him look like a wing walker straining into a three-hundred-mile-an-hour wind. He and his entourage were delighted to see Hardesty.

Hardesty's tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses and Brooks Brothers suit (he could not afford Fippo's) indicated to them that he was a man of some responsibility, honesty, and means. They didn't know if he could shoot pool, and they didn't care."I don't care how good youare, or how good you're not, " said Wing Walker."I have ten thousand dollars, and I'll play for any sum up to that and over a thousand."

"Make it ten."

"Have you got it with you?"

"No, I have only two dollars and change. But I'll give you identification and a marker."

"Would you like to play eight-ball, tortoise, or planetarium?"

"Tortoise sounds fine, " Hardesty answered."But you'll have to explain the rules."

"Now wait a minute, " Wing Walker said, sensing trouble.

"Don't worry, " Hardesty a.s.sured him."If I lose, I'll pay." Then, almost under his breath, he said, "I intend to win."

"Then how come I have to explain the game?"

"Look, " Hardesty said as he chalked his cue, "I don't play pool. The last time I did was in college, and that was a long time ago. I wasn't very good then, and I haven't played since." He looked up."I'm going to beat you."

"How do you propose to do that, " Wing Walker asked."I never fall for a bluff. So you better not have a bluff in mind."

"I never bluff, " Hardesty declared."Let's play."

Wing Walker smiled."I know you, " he said."I've met guys like you before. You're in love with the impossible."

"For the moment, yes."

"What for?" Wing Walker asked, with some sympathy, as he took off his jacket and prepared to beat Hardesty and take his $10, 000.

What Hardesty said made Wing Walker slightly nervous: "To bring back the dead." But Hardesty was not interested in the effect, only in the shining green felt of the newest table in the house.

After Wing Walker explained the rules of tortoise, they shot to see who would break. The professional's ball returned to within an inch of the cushion. Hardesty prepared to shoot, and this is how he did it.

First, he remembered what he was doing and why he was doing it. It was for Abby. It was to learn the feel of the impossible, so that he might know what to do when the time came when no one everknows what to do. It was an act of defiance, dangerous not because of the money at stake but, rather, because it was a rebellion against omnipotence. But love moved him, and he trusted that he would do well in his attempt to travel through a succession of gates that seldom had been opened. To do so, he had to concentrate.

And concentrate he did. He drove from his mind the way angels were flung from heaven all thoughts or desires unrelated to the table in front of him. He did not see or hear the spectators, his opponent or anything living or dead beyond the green felt. He did not think of winning, or losing, of Wing Walker's flowing hair and diamond-studded shirt, of the time of night, or where he was, or the nature of his gamble. He thought only of one thinga"the geometries before him. Here was G.o.d speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance. With purity and concentration, Hardesty would force his imperfect eyes to make the proper movements, and sense the truth of distances. He would will that each cell and each fiber of every muscle do as it was bid, to impart to the cue the necessary force and correct guidance to impact upon the cue ball an impulse that would allow it, in turn, to serve a higher will without subsequent degradation.

They watched him prepare, and felt heat coming from him as if there were a fire in the middle of the room. They saw that he was as tense as steel, and they knew that Wing Walker was in for a hard time. A hundred and fifty spectators had crowded around to see this, many of them doing the unheard-of in a pool halla"standing on the tables. But Hardesty was aware of nothing save absolute physics. The bright lamps above the table shone like double suns, and blackness reigned everywhere but on the green floor of the universe.

He mastered his sweating hands and positioned the cue. With a deep infatuation for the true and exact force that would bring the ball close to the cushion, he struck. His eyes followed it as it rolled smoothly to the end of the table. Its crash against the far side was as shocking as the collision of two express trains. Then it rolled back, with a telltale smooth deceleration that elevated the murmuring of the spectators. Slowly, slowly, it rolled past Wing Walker's ball, nudged itself silently against the cushion, and stopped. Cheers wentup. They loved it. But Hardesty didn't hear, for he was preparing to break. Neither did he see Wing Walker, whose expression indicated I that he, too, was conjuring up all he had. The game was being played for $10, 000, but there was something far more valuable at stakea"the idea of certainty itself.

Two hundred spectators were now ringed around the corner table, and their money was changing hands so fast that it made them look like an academy of lettuce handlers. As he studied the rack of pool b.a.l.l.s, Hardesty felt himself slightly derailing, but he was calm enough to note that the bettors standing on tables and chairs were I like the spectators at a c.o.c.kfight. This in turn led him to see the triangle of multicolored b.a.l.l.s as a formation of freshly painted Easter eggs. Further a.s.sociations would endanger his concentration, so instead of following or denying them he bent them into a curved needle which he then aimed at the heart of the matter. Here were the planets, suddenly disordered, herded together on a single orbital plane under two suns. It was his task to set things aright, to clear the savannah of the perfect spheres. But how was he going to do this? It was one thing to return the cue ball close to the cushion, but the variables there were overwhelming. Wing Walker's lifetime of experience and his wide-apart angle-judging eyes were not to be duplicated merely by intense resolution. Hardesty again felt himself derailing, and his hands were sweating so much that every few seconds he had to dry them on his thighs.

The more nervous he appeared, the more the betting went against him. While Wing Walker began to breathe easy, Hardesty trembled and felt incipient tears. To hide them, he stared at the bright suns over the table. Their rays diffracted in the water of his eyes, and made rainbows, roads, and square beams of light that guillotined the room like a thistle of crystalline broadswords. This diamond-shattering, thundering light took him back to the cathedral in North Beach, where a line from Dante inscribed across its front had always served him well in times of difficulty. Often, he had stood in the park, facing the cathedral, and read it with great satisfaction: La gloria di colui, che tutto muove, per I'universo penetra e risplende He had always believed that ultimate justice would be brought about by the light (though he had not considered that the reverse might, in fact, be more likely and more splendid).

"Shut up!" he commanded the rowdy onlookers, for what he had to do demanded primeval silence. He was going to remember what his father had taught him, and apply the laws of celestial mechanics to set straight the dazzling but disordered model of the solar system that was in front of him. It was not an easy task. He had to calculate all possible effects of velocity, acceleration, momentum force, reaction, static equilibrium, angular momentum, friction, elasticity, orbital stability, centrifugal force, conservation of energy, and vectoring as they would apply to the sixteen spheres, the waiting pockets, the mechanical qualities of the cushion, the coefficient of drag of the felt, and the exact force and import of the big bang from the cue. This he had to do without the benefit of precise measurement, and in a relatively short time. He consoled himself by thinking that since all forms of measurement were relatively inaccurate, and never as perfect as the theory that had sp.a.w.ned them, he would be able to get by with eyes and instinct. He worked at the calculations, doing the mathematics in a way that made the spectators rather nervous. He had to contrive so many sets of figures and then abandon them for later recall that, even in his heightened state, it was difficult to work the numbers and remember them at the same time. He solved this problem by changing the spectators into an abacus for his memory. By a.s.sociating their faces and dress with his vectors and coefficients and the figures by which they were expressed, he was able to store a prodigious amount of information. He broke up each man into anatomical shelves, a.s.signing various sums and angles to kneecaps, feet, head, neck, etc. This made categorical comparisons far easier.

But to do this successfully he had to prevent them from moving. Had they changed positons, his equations would all have gone to h.e.l.l."Don't move!" he commanded. They and Wing Walker thought this was strange. But it was nothing compared to what he then did, which was to walk about and stare at the onlookers, talking to himself under his breath at high speed, pointing, lifting invisible burdens (his numbers) with his fingers and moving them from oneman to another. And if they did not heed his commands he barked at them ferociously, calling them by the function he had made them represent."Shut up, Sigma!" he yelled at a little fat man in a Hawaiian shirt."Cosine! d.a.m.n it! Stay put!" he screamed, pointing at a tall black in a leather jacket. Dripping sweat from all the rapid-fire thinking, he found that he was going faster than his lips could move, so he began to sing the calculations in a strange, unearthly song. After five minutes, he was finished, and he was nearly dead from exhaustion. He had calculated the exact aiming point on the rack, the point of departure for the cue ball, the aiming point for the cue, its coordinates of approach, and the force necessary to do the job.

"All right, " he said, waving his hand at those who, with open mouths, had been unwittingly holding his numbers for him, "erase." He had it now. There were only a few things to remember, and he had fixed most of them visually.

"I'm going to break, " he announced."The one ball goes to the left side pocket; I'll put the three, five, and fourteen b.a.l.l.s in the far left corner pocket; the two, four, sixteen, and seven b.a.l.l.s in the near right corner; the six and ten b.a.l.l.s in the right side pocket; the nine, eleven, and twelve b.a.l.l.s in the near left corner pocket; the thirteen and fifteen b.a.l.l.s in the near right pocket; and then, lastly, the eight in the far right corner.

"That is, " he added, clearing his throat, "if all goes according to plan." He nervously chalked his cue.

"Aren't you going to give me a chance to shoot?" Wing Walker asked sarcastically.

"No, " Hardesty answered, and took his stance.

He had to impart a great deal of force to the cue ball, for not only had all the numbered b.a.l.l.s to find their pockets, but some had to do a lot of bouncing and traveling around before they actually fell in, while others were slated to give encouraging b.u.mps to their more reluctant confreres. And yet the force could not be greater than that which would make the b.a.l.l.s jump the sides of the table. Needless to say, Hardesty placed the cue ball very carefully. He lined himself up, got his cue into position, drew his arm back, and shot.

As the rack exploded, Hardesty turned to Wing Walker and said, "This is going to take some time." He was perfectly relaxed,and looked on approvingly as the b.a.l.l.s began to leap into the pockets About four or five dived in immediately. The others, however, seemed intent on presenting a tattoo, and they careered about the table missing one another, sometimes colliding, and sometimes even stopping. But, certainly enough, when they stopped, they would receive a glancing blow from a speedy cousin, and slink off in shame to the mouth of a nearby cave. As Hardesty had predicted, it took some time, until, finally, the eight ball, after a long drive in the country, rolled in at a businesslike pace and slapped itself into the right corner pocket.

No one dared move or speaka"except Wing Walker, who, with a packet of bills in his hand, bravely approached Hardesty. Wing Walker's big face was half twitching in puzzlement and shyness.

"I don't want the money, " Hardesty said, already lost in consideration of his next task."I didn't do it for the money." He walked out.

They would have followed him, had they not been rooted in place. Eventually, they began to tremble and shake. And then they screamed and wailed like Holy Rollers to whom an angel has appeared. These men were very tough and very big, but their shrieks were shrill and squeaky. They didn't know what was happening to them, and people pa.s.sing on the street looked up in wonder, imagining that they had stumbled on the climax of some great urban voodoo.

Hardesty was already half a mile south.

EARLY one morning, after several hungry days of terrible encounters and unspeakable physical tests, all of which brought nothing, Hardesty awoke in what appeared to be a Byzantine cathedral that had been converted into a gymnasium. With no memory of how he had come to be there, he knew only that he had exited from a cold and uncomfortable sleep, and found himself lying on an exercise mat. He went through a long hallway to a deserted lobby where he discovered that he was in a health club on Wall Street. He had it all himself. From investigation of the time clock, he determined that the first employee punched in at ten.

Just as the clock struck six, the heat began to come up. Little whistles and plumes and the strange briny smell of radiator steam vied for attention with the knocking pipes. In the big room where he had awakened, the light from the rising sun hit a high bank of frosted windows and exploded in fumes of white and yellow that colored the ropes and balance beams, warming the hemp and the wood. Hardesty watched the sun track its course. Nearly drained, he could think of nothing, and had so little strength that he ignored the beckoning gymnastic equipment.

Had it been a few days earlier, he would have tried to make an iron cross on the rings, or fly gravityless on the high bar, to see what he could see about such things. But now it was difficult for him even to raise his head to look at the sun in the windows at the top of the Byzantine dome.

The clear morning light had been bent by the circle of windows until it made a perfectly round golden platform that dazzlingly plugged the dome. Hardesty rose to his feet. The climbing rope which fell from the center of the cupola now seemed to lead to the first platform of heaven. Even the rope itself sparkled like a thick golden braid.

A hundred feet above, the golden disc had thickened. It seemed solid, and he wanted to get to it. But he could hardly stand, much less climb, and there were cuts on his hands, as if he had been hauling steel cables. From the way the sun was moving, pumping gold into the platform until it seemed that the dome would no longer be able to hold the weight, he could see that, as it had been given, it would be taken away. He began to climb.

In climbing, he found the compound mortal agonies that he had sought, and as he moved higher on the golden rope he really did rise. The rope itself ran scarlet as his blood poured from him like hot water escaping from a breached pipe. Though the braid below him was now as red as it was gold, he pulled himself upward without cease, thinking only that if he could reach the platform he would need neither blood nor strength. His palms were rubbed away, and the grip on the rope became so slick that he had to clamp it with his bones. In agony and delirium, he saw whitened hands and dry bones leading him up and pulling him on. Halfway up, his hands becamemechanical things with a life of their own. As he rose, he seemed to be hauling more and more weight. What fish, he wondered, are in this net that it seems so ma.s.sive and unyielding?

Almost at the top, the rope burst into gentle flames that wound around it in a soft helix. He moved his left hand into its base. It was hot, but it didn't burn, and as he climbed into the flames, the blood on his clothes vanished and his hands began to heal.

The platform just above was almost too bright to be seen. Beyond, the windows were ablaze in white and silver frost. He saw engraved upon them an infinity of precisely etched forms. Winglike chevrons seemed to be moving into the sun like flights of black angels. Deep inside the thicket of feathery etchings were gleaming landscapes, and in every pane of gla.s.s the engraved rime led to worlds within worlds. The deeper they went, in long tunnels to the vanishing point, the wider they opened up and the more they seemed to hold eternal battles, fields that burned as aerial forces fought above them, and round suns that bled in pinpoint gilding dashed about in waves of blue. The sun tractored across the forest of lines in the gla.s.s, cutting them into bundles that flowed like handfuls of broken wheat.

Hardesty Marratta tried to poke his head through the golden disc. He was immediately pushed back. He grabbed the rope and viciously hiked himself up, but was slapped down with equal ferocity. Finally, he tried for all he was worth, rising like a high-powered sh.e.l.l, to attempt to get through the impenetrable mat above his head. He was swatted like a fly.

He fell backward, arms spread, fingers outstretched, through a hundred feet of empty air below him. It would have done no good even had he been able to turn, like a cat, and land the way he wanted. A hundred feet were a hundred feet, best taken however they would be delivered. But as he fell, he realized that he was coursing from left to right, swaying in pendulum arcs, and dropping only slowly. The air around him beat with a thousand unseen wings which damped his fall and set him down so gently that, for a moment or two, he hovered above the mat.

Hardesty opened his eyes. Several men in gymnasium clothes had him by the arms.

"Are you one of us?" they asked.

"What are you?" Hardesty returned. Then he looked at their expressions."You must be bankers and brokers."

"Are you a member here?"

"It's all in your numbers, " Hardesty said, "if only you would read them in the right way."

"He must come in from the street, " one of the men said."I thought for a moment he was a member who had had an accident."

"I floated like a b.u.t.terfly, " Hardesty declared as they picked him up and carried him out in a sort of invisible sedan chair."When I rose into the flame and fell back, I thought I was going to hit the floor. But I floated like a b.u.t.terfly."

As he was carried past the clock in the lobby, he saw that it said eleven. With the mixed reverence and disdain that people have for lunatics, they set him down on the street.

"One more thing, " he said.

"What's that, " one of them answered as they were going up the steps.

"Your gymnasium was packed with angels."

They didn't hear.

IN the December cold, without a cent in his pockets, and not having eaten for days, Hardesty began to walk the length of Manhattan. He had failed Abby, and, in failing her, he had also failed his father. The pride that had allowed him to think that he would have the strength for a raid on heaven now filled him with nausea and fear.

As he pa.s.sed people rushing by the scores of thousands on the streets, he saw the glory of their faces. He saw in the way their eyes were seta"in their reddened cheeks, and in their expressions of hope, determination, or angera"whatever it was that made them more than skeletons and flesh, for the life in their faces far transcended the material into which it had strayed. And yet if he were to grasp for it, all he would have would be the lapels of a coat and a startled and fearful pedestrian inside. Though the light he sought was shining all around, he could not capture it.

He might think of the small coffin (like a salesman's sample) in which his daughter would have to be buried. But then the life of the streets and the glory of people's faces would rush into his blood, andhe would believe once more that he would be able to keep her alive if only he could understand the force behind the city's many vital scenes: the harried expression of a hooded boy pushing a garment rack through snow-filled streets; a tailor in the fur district bent over his machine, st.i.tching forward into the eternity of tailors; a squad of street breakers machine-gunning the concrete with the concentration of working infantrya"something there was that knitted all these scenes together and pushed them on a forward course. The empty corridors and rising shapes held the secret, which rested invisibly upon the city, like a column of clear air. And yet when he clenched his fist around it and wanted to wrestle it down, it wasn't there. Thoroughly beaten, he was swept up in the crowds. He was weak and dizzy, and the human tides on the streets just before Christmas proved impossible to resist.

Like a chip in a flume, he ebbed back and forth on the avenues. He was carried into huge department stores and drained out. He fell with the stream down the steps of the subway, and rode a stop or two before he was lifted once again onto the street. And he found himself stuck in an intersection as if it were a whirlpool. Crossing and recrossing a hundred times, limp, feverish, and defeated, he was taken completely at random by millions of people who were galloping about as if their lives depended upon it.

When the offices let out at five, a torrent of gabardine and wool flooded the streets in blue and gray. Everyone was running. In some places, the waves of clerks and typists were three or four layers deep. It sounded like water, or a gra.s.s fire pushed by the wind, and at five-fifteen the streets of midtown Manhattan were like the aisles of a burning theater.

Finally, in a convergence that looked like the Niagara River pouring into Horseshoe Falls, a stupendous ma.s.s of frenzied overcoats and taut faces fell into Grand Central Terminal, drawing Hardesty with it. He was lucky to be on the edge of the flow, and he managed to maneuver himself to safety on a balcony overlooking the mam floor. Here, primarily because of an overwhelming dread of traveling to Hartsdale on the five-twenty, he held fast to a marble bal.u.s.trade Clamping himself to the rail, he rested for an hour, until the tide receded and he was warm.

Except for a stream of commuters still moving between the doors I and the staircase that led down to the main floor, the Vanderbilt Avenue balcony was nearly deserted, and the vast concourse began to show bald spots of caramel-colored marble where empty islets had formed in a carpet loomed with the thread of all the comings and goings since 1912. No one ever looked up. The ceiling had been dark and cloudy for so long that it had been forgotten. Though for most people the barrel vault was too high to bother with, Hardesty slowly tilted his head until, as he leaned back, he was able to see it in its entirety.

The stars were on. They shone in incandescent yellow from deep ! in the green. Since when? They were supposed to have been extinguished forever. It was believed that they had burnt out one by one and would never light again, and that they had been placed too high to be reached or changed. No one tried, and eventually the stars were forgotten and denied. But now they were lit. And not one was missing.

"Look, " Hardesty commanded a young woman in the uniform of a dental a.s.sistant, "the stars are lit."

"What stars?" she asked, without looking up at them, and ran toward the tunnels to catch her habitual train.

"Those stars, " Hardesty said to himself, staring at the green sky.

As his eyes traversed the high vault, he saw something move in the center. It seemed as if, in an earthquake of the heavens, a piece of the sky had been jolted out of place. He thought it had to be an optical illusion. But a crack appeared. Then it vanished, but it appeared for a second time, and oscillated, as if someone were struggling with a heavy door. Suddenly a patch of green sky was pulled back, and a dark square appeared in the ceiling. Hardesty found it difficult to breathe. The door could not have opened by itself.

Though no one was visible, Hardesty waited patiently for someone to appear, and his patience was rewarded when, high above, a face emerged from the shadows to stare down at the rushing armies clothed in gabardine and wool.

FOR THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF CHELSEA.

IN old age, moments of great energy and lucidity are like wet islands in a dry sea, and in powerful rages and sudden joys an old man with a cane may discover that his many years have added nothing to his innocence but proof and explanation, and that, as much as he may have learned in his long life, he cannot see as far as he could see when he was seven. Harry Penn was often subject to such moments, during which he was electrified to find that he was learning what he had at one time known before he paid the price of finding out.

He had grown up with the millennium in his eyes, and now he wanted Jackson Mead's bridge to go as far and high as could be imagined, and beyond, speeding like a lance through the cloud wall. For this to happen, he knew, conditions on the ground had to beimprobably perfect. No human agency could see to the many alignments, lock up the unraveled st.i.tches, or bring about the complete and resounding justice that would be required: and yet everything had to be in place and everyone would have to move briskly on the lighted stage exactly according to his part. Harry Penn believed that he had not yet completed the task of his life, and this saddened him. It wasn't enough just to grow old. He wanted miracles. He wanted life where there was no life, the negation of time, and the gilding of the universea"if only for one truly wonderful moment. He wanted to see the huge whitened plumes, like those ceremonial plumes on carriage horses, which his father had promised him would rise above the city in announcement of the golden age.

So he romanced his books and encyclopedias, to no avail, remembered as much as he could of what he had seen, and kept alert to the architecture of the spirit as it suffered its periodic and allegorical devastations and restorations. He often filled the huge slate tub with water and jumped in just to let his thoughts float free, but they never floated free enough to prepare him for the millennium that was fast approaching.

One evening, Jessica's performance was canceled because of unusually bitter cold. From all over Manhattan, as materials contracted in the low temperatures, came the sound of snapping cables and cracking masonrya"local whippings that were winter's answers to the lightning. As the small thundercracks reverberated, Jessica rode in a sleigh from the theater to her father's house, where she cooked some lamb and peas, and they had dinner in front of the fire. Though Praeger was expected later on, they were alone. Christiana was with Asbury, and Boonya had gone to see her sister who lived in Malto Downs.

After Jessica had cleared the table and washed the dishes, she came back with two mugs of black tea and a tin of shortbread cookies upon which was a picture of a Highland Fusilier in a Black Watch kilt. Strong tea was good for Harry Penn's imagination. As the fire burned, its resinous pine and bone-dry hickory became a Waterloo of advancing red lines and tiny gunshots. Harry Penn was still bedeviled. The tea and the fire stoked him up.

"What happens, " he asked Jessica, "when you forget your lines?"

"I don't."

"Never?"

"Very rarely. Almost never. Because, you see, in portraying the character I play, I learn the lines to become the character, not the other way around. Once I become her, I can't forget the lines. It's unthinkable."

"Do you mean that learning lines for the stage has very little to do with memory?"

"Exactly. Only bad actors memorize lines. Good actors are perpetually writing them as they act."