Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047939.
Fandom: A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
Rating: General Audiences
Contains references to a canonical character death.
Published 2017-12-17 for the 2017 Yuletide exchange.
Words: 2,471
“‘We sat for that portrait on a very beautiful day,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be outside, but she made me stand beside her from morning until night. Sometimes when I got tired of standing, I knelt on a little stool in back of her. I didn’t see the sun once that day, but only a perfectly blue sky through the upper part of a north window.
“‘Later, at night, I was quite surprised to find that my muscles were pleasantly sore, and that my face and arms were sunburned.
“‘She said it was my reward, and that it was only a part of what was to come. I didn’t know then what she meant, but now I do know.’”
--Winter’s Tale, “A Golden Age”
Peter Lake is posing for a portrait and thinking about the past.
At nine years old, on the Bay, he was considered old enough to have his own boat, but he was too small to be any good at paddling it. Sometimes he took his canoe out on one of the little ponds or marshes of the Bay to go fishing. Proud of his independence, he would set out with a will to get straight across the middle of the pond, but he could never paddle in a straight line. First he would pull his paddle back strongly on one side of the canoe, and the boat would turn decisively toward the other side; then he would push the flat of his paddle out away from himself, churning up the water, and the nose of the boat would reluctantly swing back toward his destination. He zigzagged across the pond like this, tiring himself out with throwing his whole body weight against the water every time. By the time he reached the opposite side of the lake he was always worn out, rubber-armed, and acutely aware that he would have to paddle himself home again. Knowing this, he put it off as long as he could. He would fish on the far side of the lake until the sun was low and then would zigzag back home again, his arms sore now that they had had a chance to rest after his first exertion.
But what he is remembering now, as he stands still to be painted, is the feeling of sitting at the far side of the lake. He always lingered there with mixed pleasure and dread, casting out a fishing line again and again without thinking very much about whether he caught anything, wishing he didn’t have to make the return trip. He is remembering how time went fast and slow simultaneously; how he savored every moment when he didn’t have to be paddling, stretching out his legs and resting his feet against the floor of the boat. The sun-warmed wood was rough against his skin; the water had a calm mucky smell and made a skirring sound as it washed against the side of the boat. He breathed the most deeply at those times, watched the sky the most carefully, observed the individual moments as they flittered past like insects. It felt like forever until, all at once, it was over, and he had to go home.
A second part of him is thinking, a little, about the room where he is standing in a borrowed suit and uncomfortable pinching shoes, an electric light shining in his face and a tiny sunbeam resting warmly across the back of his shoulders, reminding him of the sunny day outside that he is missing.
At the same time, both these parts of him, and all the rest of him besides, are thinking about Beverly.
Beverly is sitting up very straight and thinking about the present.
Beverly’s posture is always impeccable, and the members of her class call this a sign of moral uprightness. The two things are unrelated, of course. Beverly has good posture because her father outfitted his children’s rooms with extremely uncomfortable furniture so that none of them ever got used to leaning against the back of a chair, and when they grew out of the nursery he had a habit of running up to them with a yardstick at random times and measuring how tall they were at that exact moment. “Yesterday you had gained two inches,” he once said to Beverly in a mock-mournful tone of voice, “but today you’ve lost three!” Beverly protested that she had not lost any height at all; she was only leaning over the book in her lap. But Isaac Penn carried on so, when he got into these moods, that there was no reasoning with him. She stopped stooping just to put an end to these arguments. Nowadays, she is provided with extremely soft and comfortable furnishings wherever she goes, and everyone knows that she is dying, yet she declines the opportunity to wilt. Her back diligently holds her upright for as long as it can.
Beverly’s father badly wants a picture of her. She knows it is a memorial, which annoys her. She is sure there is something wrong with the way her father is thinking about her death, and about time in general, but she has only an intuition about the truth of the matter and it is difficult to convey. “Picture the gods of the universe, enormous creatures whose motions are so far beyond our imagining that to witness them would obliterate a human mind,” she proposes, “and then know that they are already here.” He does not know how to respond to this.
But she enjoys sitting for the portrait. She likes how painters cherish something particular, the precise and persnickety practice of noticing. This painter is looking carefully at the dove-grey fall of her dress. It’s reflecting the lamplight so that the dress looks white and blue and green in different places, and she can see the painter’s brush picking up each of these colors. Sometimes they all get mixed together with a painting knife and make a color she could not have foreseen. Sometimes the painter stops in the middle of this process and dabs the paint knife into the mixed colors, making a wet thwacking sound a little like a child jumping into a mud puddle.
Beverly and Peter Lake are in two separate pictures, and it will not be possible for them to be portrayed holding hands. But for the time being, the painter focuses on the colors of the dress, and so Beverly slides her hand against Peter Lake’s dry palm and runs her thumb up and down the side of his index finger, feeling affection for the roughness of his skin. Love is so opaquely arbitrary. Usually if she likes a person she likes them for a reason, but it turns out it is possible to love someone for no reason at all. Beverly loves Peter Lake because he appeared in her life ready for her to love him. It is not wholly that simple—there is a great deal in him that she morally values, that she thoughtfully admires, that she finds whimsically impossible to understand. Still: before he appeared in her house, she would never have picked him out of a crowd. The whole affair is a thunderous accident. He thinks so, too, she can tell. She means it when she says she loves him, but sometimes she says it just to observe how baffled he is in response, how disbelieving that he could be here with her.
She tickles the palm of his hand a little and watches the corner of his mouth as he fights not to smile.
If they were a more ordinary couple, they might be spending less time together. They would still be courting, planning for a life yet to be built. Peter Lake would come in the evenings to sit in the front room and drink tea with Beverly while making little comments about her talent at the piano or the family they would start together. If Beverly still had a mother, the two of them would work together on a trousseau.
But as it is, there’s no use thinking of the future. That’s just borrowing grief. So instead they are building a life right where they are, immediately, powered by Beverly’s faith that whatever is to come, whether it be her death by consumption or the destruction of the city, the life they have now counts, matters, and will not be wiped away by time. Their time together passes like a snowfall, every moment a tiny weightless flake pattering down to the ground, all of the flakes rushing together too fast.
It is both easy and difficult for the two of them to converse with each other, thanks to the fact that their respective fields of knowledge and experience do not overlap at all. He can talk for days about machines: not only how they work but the divine logic of them, their importance and their dreadful weight. He talks to her about his childhood on the Bay and his youth under the thumb of Reverend Mootfowl, the way he keeps being set adrift alone and the way he is always running from something. He will never run out of stories to tell her. His whole life is a fabulous fairy tale that she has never heard before.
In return, Beverly tells him about her first piano teacher, who had a near-debilitating fear of drafts and always showed up at the Penns’ house swathed in sweaters and shawls, which significantly impeded her ability to play. When she tried to demonstrate a technique she inevitably dragged her fringes across Beverly’s face, knocked over the metronome, and made the younger children giggle with the batlike swoops of her arms. Peter Lake has never before spent time in a drawing room where people could afford to be ridiculous. He is a little awed by the extravagant safety of the Penns’ circle of acquaintance, the way they are all so socially and financially secure that they need no one’s good opinion and so never try for it. It is an absurdly far cry from the obsequious faux respectability of Reverend Mootfowl’s enterprise, or the resolute facade of toughness that he has had to affect since Mootfowl’s death. Eccentricity is a new thing to him. He imagines the great security a person must have to show up in a millionaire’s home swaddled in blankets to teach the children piano, and he laughs in disbelief.
Much of their time together is spent in telling stories like these, each of them drawing on an inexhaustible store. But they talk about the present, too, and it is here that their love becomes a creative force.
“I saw a flock of white pelicans taking off over the East River,” Beverly says one day, when Peter Lake arrives at her sanctuary on the roof. He has been spending his time, when he is not with her, inspecting the machinery of The Sun. He thinks he is a little in love with it, although he may just be directing toward the machines an overflow of his love for Beverly.
“White pelicans?” he says. “Here? In the winter? We only have brown ones, and they go south in the autumn.”
“Today we had white ones,” says Beverly. “An enormous flock of them flying east straight into the sunrise.”
Beverly reads National Geographic but she had to leave school when she fell ill. Peter Lake lived twelve years on the Bay but has never been to school in his life. So both of them have some knowledge of things like what pelicans can be seen in New York, and when, but neither of them wears the blinders of academic authority, and they can talk on the subject with freewheeling inventiveness.
“Perhaps,” says Peter Lake, “they have been cast out from pelican society in the west and are attempting to set out and form a separatist colony.”
“Perhaps they are religious heretics,” Beverly replies, “who abide by the medieval practice of feeding their young with their own blood.”
“Pelicans used to do that?”
“No, but people in the middle ages thought they did. You can see pictures of it in the carvings on old cathedrals. The pelican in her piety. It’s a symbol of Christ, or of motherhood, or of universities.”
“Why universities?”
“Because it’s like a mother. That’s why people who went to college talk about their alma maters. It’s Latin for ‘nourishing mother.’”
“I would rather have a real mother,” says Peter Lake, with more wistfulness in his voice than he has allowed himself for years.
“Well, yes,” Beverly says. “So would I. But neither of us gets either of those things, so pelicans will have to mean something else for us. Where do you think they were going?”
“To the stars,” he says at first, moved by what she has told him. “Or, perhaps they like the cold for the same reason you do. Maybe they’re part of the burning world and they’ve flown north for the winter to find relief.”
When he finishes speaking there is a thudding sound on the roof, and both Peter Lake and Beverly look out through the tent flap to see a white pelican staring at them with an inquisitive look in its eye. It seems to toss its head like it is scoffing at them and lifts off from the roof again.
In this way they build a world between them, large enough to encompass the stars and small enough to fit in Beverly’s rooftop tent. It is a fragile universe, but both of them put their faith in its capacity to outlast them.
Harry Penn is watching them and thinking about the future.
He doesn’t see things like Beverly does, or know them, or dream them, or whatever it is that happens before she makes announcements about eternity. Usually this doesn’t happen. He is a teenage boy, and when he can, he prefers to focus on his own social life. But the world doesn’t always let him do that. The world dropped him into a family that includes Beverly; it dropped his naughty magazines onto his father’s dinner table; and today it has dropped into his head a vision:
Himself, a very old man, sitting at a dining room table with these paintings of Beverly and Peter Lake behind him, looking around at a group of people who are bickering joyfully with an extravagant vocabulary.
The house at the Lake of the Coheeries, overcast with an ominous shifting orange light.
Beverly, wearing her old riding gear that she hasn’t put on since she took ill, riding an enormous white horse across a bridge made out of light, out of harp strings, out of jewels. They are barreling toward a destination so bright that he can’t see it, ready to pass out of his sight when they suddenly slow to a canter, then a walk, then a stop, beside Peter Lake, who has appeared on the bridge out of nowhere. Beverly puts down a hand and Peter Lake takes it, and puts his other hand on the back of the unsaddled horse, and he swings himself up onto the horse’s back behind Beverly. The horse canters in a little circle with its head and tail held high, proud of itself, and then Beverly leans forward and says something into its ear and it takes off again like a shot, toward the blinding light. It’s shrinking rapidly but the two people on the horse are aiming for its heart. It looks as though they’re going to make it.