Winter's Tale Part 15

"I don't," Hardesty said."Not as a matter of religion, but because I just don't."

They were astounded that there could be such a thing as a plains cowboy, riding in their club car, who did not play cards.

"Young man," Cozad said,"I never met anyone above the age of five who couldn't play poker. You're not trying to make it easier for yourself, are you?"

"No, sir," Hardesty said."I never played enough to remember the rules."

"But you did play."

Hardesty shrugged his shoulders."Mainly fish: that is to say the game offish. I'm not describing my opponents."

"There's a game called fish?"

"Yes."

"Never heard of it. What about seven-card stud?"

Warmed and incited by the tea, Hardesty a.s.serted,"I think I played that a little. Anyway, I could always learn, couldn't I." Hesmiled.

Cozad tapped the green leather table as he spoke."I don't thinkyou're a sharper. But if you are, you're in the right place, because wea"me and Lawson here, and Georgea"have a reputation that frightens most people away from us. What we count on is some young ram with a lot of his father's money, who thinks he can beat us. This train has proved empty of rams. You aren't one. I can tell just by lookin'. But we don't like to play without a new face. That's our invitation."

"I have only two hundred and sixty dollars," Hardesty said, "and I've got to pay my fare."

"We could put the calf in the ring, Coe," Lawson said."What's that?" Hardesty asked."It doesn't sound so good tome."

"What that is, is excellent for you. We all chip in even and set you up with a stake so you can play. If you lose, you owe us nothing, and you yourself lose nothing. If you win, you pay us back and keep the rest. It's how we teach our sons to play."

After ten minutes of drill in five-card high-low draw, they bankrolled him with $10, 000. Being a Marratta, he didn't bat an eyelash at that kind of money, and they were momentarily suspicious. But they knew every decent player in the country, and would have been grateful (had he been able to beat them) to have found a new one. Word would have flashed from one end of the continent to another that a young power was on the rise.

"Okay," said Cozad."Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not. It's started to snow out there. Turn up the stove. This game ends at mile marker five on the west side of St. Louis: not before, not after. The Denver-St. Louis game traditionally has a limit of ninety thousand dollars. Food and beverage on the dealer. Draw for deal."

People thought that gamblers were no good because they didn't work. But anyone who thought this had obviously never stayed up all night between Denver and St. Louis staying sharp on the cards. It was sore comfort. The forward hurtling of a train through blinding snow and arctic winds was hypnosis in itself, and the warm club car as quiet as a library, did not encourage taking risks. The snow-covered country outside was a rough place where it was possible to die just from the wind, and animals there were lowing just as if there had never been any men on earth. If a switchman someplace in Nebraska were to have overslept, the train might easily have flown off a fifty-foot bank. People didn't like gamblers, because gamblers reminded them that they were gamblers, too. So they invented the libel that gambling isn't work. It is work. It's worse than work. It's like working in a coal mine. Hardesty quickly found this out.

His throat grew sore and his muscles started to ache. His head felt as if it had been bolted to his spine by a Visigoth mechanic. But all the time that he played cards on a green leather table as the Polaris shot across short-gra.s.s country in the long white night, he knew that he was doing what he was supposed to be doing. It was not just that Cozad, with his patrician's beard and gentle eyes, was remarkably like his father. Nor was it that he was winning, and he was. It was, instead, that he had given himself to fortune entirely. And it had much to do with the hard beauty of the prairie outside. He couldn't see much more than the surprised coils of snow das.h.i.+ng against the window like panicked sagebrush, and he sweated, because the old men (who were cold despite their angora vests) wanted the heat on as high as it could go.

He put his cards down on the table, or took them up, with graceful exaggerated motions, because the tea and the sound of the rails had gotten to him. But he was winning. He never slipped below six thousand. Then he began to build over that, steadily, without fail, in complete blind confidence.

"Which is higher, four of a kind or a flush?" he might ask, much embarra.s.sed that the rules hadn't stuck with him. For several hours, the old men lost a lot because they thought that he knew how to bluff. But he never bluffed once, he just wona"if not the high hand, then the low hand. Once, when one of the old men had a flushwith the queen as top card, Hardesty had a royal flush. If one of the old men had a hand of irredeemable garbage, Hardesty would throw out worse garbage, sometimes only by a point, or not even that if it were a tie and the issue was decided by who had put out first.

"Things like this happen," said Cozad the next morning as they pa.s.sed mile marker five just west of St. Louis, and the game ended. Hardesty tried to give back his winnings. They wouldn't let him.

They got off in St. Louis."Go to the bank in the station and get a check for that sum made out to you," Cozad instructed."People have been killed for a lot less. And another thing: it was just luck. An armadillo can play better cards than you can. Be grateful."

Hardesty was saddened when Cozad left, because Cozad looked like his father, and he would never see either one of them again. He went to a bank near the station to get his check, came back, bought himself a compartment on the train, and tipped the porters the way gambling winners were supposed to.

He took a long shower, shaved, and went to bed. Winter air and daylight came in the partially open window until the compartment was blinding white and freezing cold. Hardesty peered from his warm bed at the bank check that was sticking out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket. It was drawn on the Harvesters and Planters Bank of St. Louis, and it was for $70, 000, even. He had a few thousand in cash in the other pocket.

The ground was covered with snow outside of St. Louis and on into Illinois. He had asked the porter to awaken him only in New York. The sleep that he wanted was perhaps not deserved, but it was well paid for. Long before they reached Chicago, he was dreaming of the darkened club car, the glowing cards, and the blood-red lamps.

EARLY one morning in the beginning of the second winter that she had spent without Virginia, Mrs. Gamely arose and peered out the attic window. She held Jack the rooster in her arms as if he were a fat white cat. After Virginia left, she had spoiled him silly, feeding him corn until he could hardly walk, and talking to him for hours on end as if he could understand her inimitable polysyllabic Latinates and her short, strong, Anglo-Saxon phrases as fresh as new hay andas powerful as a bowman's arm. He had at least one quality which humans, especially students, might well have envied: no matter how many hours she talked, he would stare directly at her, transfixed. If there were a pause in her exposition, he would strut for a pace or two until she started up again, and then freeze in place with a look of rapture until the next silence allowed him to s.h.i.+ft his foot or cluck to clear his throat. No chicken in her remembrance (and she could remember thousands of chickens individually) had ever had such an extraordinary attention span. Jack earned his keep. He was clever He looked like a panorama of snow-covered hills behind which a blazing sun was just about to set (the effect of his red c.o.xcomb). He was courteous, forbearing, bright, and sincere. And, had he been able to understand English, he would have learned a great deal. Mrs. Gamely had secrets that she had never shared even with Virginia, because she knew that all secrets worth knowing come clear in good time.

After five days, the snow finally stopped a foot short of the eaves. When Mrs. Gamely looked west she saw the village standing firm in a sea of white, its chimneys smoking busily with the breakfast fires, the inhabitants barely visible as they stood upon their roofs to survey the arctic lake. It was said that the second winter was going to be harder than the first. Predictions such as this had been nurtured into gigantism by a summer so hot that the lake water was scalding and chickens laid soft-boiled eggs. That August, houses, trees, and sometimes whole forests had suddenly burst into flame as if the sun had been beaming at them through Priestley's gla.s.s."So the pendulum will swing," said Mrs. Gamely to Jack, as they watched the wind whipping at the snow."And so it has swung. Forever a balance. Nature hangs on stubbornly to rhetoric and ethics, even if human populations have long abandoned them, and its grammar is strict and idiosyncratic. Lookit there, Jack. The lake has become rolling hills of snow. G.o.d is treating us to fire and ice. He must be agitated. He must have something in mind."

A sharp knock on the front door startled her into a violent hiccup. She put her hand to her chest and said,"Daythril Moobcot tunneled." Racing through the cottage as fast as she could, she wondered why they had come through so early, and hoped that it wasnot because of any bad news. When she opened the door, there was Daythril Moobcot, standing in an ice-blue tunnel that went all the way to the village."Daythril! When did you start this tunnel?" "Two days ago, Mrs. Gamely."

"Why? I have plenty of provisions. You know it's unwise to tunnel in a blizzard. You're old enough to remember when Hagis Purgin and Ranulph Vonk were buried in their own tunnel and weren't found until spring. Always wait to see how much snow there'llbe on top."

"I know that, Mrs. Gamely. But everyone's moving around because we heard over the telegraph that the blizzard caught the Polaris somewhere within the county lines. There are two hundred people on it. If they're still alive, we'll be bringing them to the village. Can you take in five or six until the plough train gets through?"

"Naturally I can. They won't be too comfortable, but so what, they'll be alive. How are they going to get from the railroad to the village? The shortest distance it could possibly be is fifteen miles. Won't it be the death of all those city people in their city clothes to come that distance in deep snow at forty-five below?"

"No, ma'am," said Daythril Moobcot, proudly."We've been planning for two days. Fifty men left an hour ago. They're pulling twenty-five sleds loaded with food, warm clothing, and skis that we scrounged up or made. When they get to the railroad line, two scouts will be waiting, having reconnoitered the whole length of track. We sent the two fastest skiers in the village. One of them will have found the train, and will lead the others to it. They'll bring everyone back, in the dark. It'll take a long time, since most of them probably don'tknow how to ski."

"I'll set out the bedding," Mrs. Gamely said."And I'd better start baking right away. They'll need some hot breads and a boiling stew, especially if they've had nothing to eat for a few days. Will they know what has happened to them, and where they are?"

"I doubt it."

"No matter. The ones with good souls will find out, and those who don't know, don't need to know." She closed the door and began to rush about, a.s.sembling the best of her provisions, lighting her bee oven, and whipping up an ambrosial batter.

DURING the five days of blizzard the trainmen and pa.s.sengers of the Polaris had come to the end of their carefully rationed food and burned all the coal that had been in the hopper car. Now, huddled together in two sleeping coaches, they were wrapped in blankets curtains, and rugs, and they faced small fires in improvised wood stoves fueled by ripped-up paneling and sacrificed baggage. The engineer had nearly frozen to death finding the telegraph line, only to discover that it was dead. Half a dozen men with pistols fitted to improvised stocks sat in the bright sunlight on top of the train, just about even with the snow, waiting for arctic hares and birds. As a result of their labor, three quail and a rabbit were boiling at length in a caldron down below. The idea was to cook the flesh out of existence, so that the watery soup could then be justly divided (infants were well fed from a special reserve of food that would remain until the last adult was unable to feed them).

Cold and hunger in concert had quickly brought forth the essential qualities of those upon whom they were visited. Two men had already been lost to their impatience after they had foolishly set out in the snow and frozen to death, unseen, in drifts only a hundred feet from the train. A woman had surrendered to madness (or perhaps had been mad to start), quite a few were deathly ill, and one man was dead from gunshot wounds he suffered while trying to steal food from the common store. Those were the casualties. The trainmen, however, faced their responsibilities selflessly. And others were equally heroic in caring for the sick, giving up rations and blankets, and working to counter the influence of people who were easily disheartened.

After the snow stopped, Hardesty spent most of his time on top of the train, scanning the sky and drifts for game. Neither he nor the other hunters talked. They were too far apart, they didn't want to scare off their quarry, and it was too cold for conversation anyway. They wondered to themselves how long it would stay so frigid that the plough train would not be able to move. The nearest town on the map was a hundred miles distant, and they knew that it was toocold for machines to fly, since all forms of lubrication had become stickier than taffy.

They sat bundled in parkas and blankets, watching their breath crystallize in front of them and remembering the five-day blizzard, when fine snow blown into perfect equilibrium by balanced and opposing winds had seemed to hesitate in midair and freeze the pa.s.sage of time. They watched the sun traverse a subdued winter arc, and, occasionally, thinking that they had seen a rabbit, they fired their pistols into the snow.

In this area it sometimes remained fifty below or less for weeks at a time. They knew that even if every single one of their remaining bullets had found its mark in a fat hare, there would not have been food sufficient for a day. Most distressing was that the fittings and freight would be burned up by the next morning, and there simply was not enough bedding or winter clothing to keep fifty people from freezing to death, much less two hundred. Even were someone somewhere to find a piece of functional, unburied, unblocked equipment that could travel over snow, would he know to go to them? Would they be an important priority, and could the many miles between the nearest settlement and the stranded train be covered in time? It seemed to those who could reason that everyone there was soon to die.

Down below in the disheveled sleeping coaches, they didn't know how fast the train was being gutted, or how terribly cold it was outside, or that drifts forty feet high were all that anyone on the roof of the train could see. Still, they took comfort from their number. Two hundred people, together, were safe, they thought. But Hardesty knew that this was a mistake, for his father had told him of the thirty thousand Turkish soldiers on the Russian frontier, near Ararat, who had been surprised by an early mountain winter and had later been found, grouped together, frozen to death. Cold, he knew, had never been impressed by numbers.

He and the others stared at the blinding drifts, imagining at times that they were on a polar sea. Their hands and feet were long numbed, and had ceased to tingle. It was hard to believe that such freezing white light came from what they had once known as thesun. When this sun was most of the way through its short winter arc, and was so flat, cool, and tame that it looked like a metal disc trapped for show on the face of a grandfather clock, the men on the roof of the train prepared for the worst. Soon it would be dark, and the cold unbearable. Soon the fires would stutter and go out, sending up a last gray column of cooling smoke. The sun, their only hope, was quickly heading downward. They stared in its direction, trying to harvest the last of its light and warmth, but it was a cold and unfamiliar thing, and the hiss of the wind seemed like its dying exhalations.

Hypnotized and blinded, utterly still, they did not immediately see the miracle that made its way in from the west. Miles away, a line of strong winter-bred farmers moved in military formation, kicking and gliding on their long skis, dipping down into the depressions in the snow and taking them at speed to get momentum for the trip up. They came as steadily as a herd of reindeer or gazelles. Fifty men pulled twenty-five sleds. Stretched out in a wide phalanx with a sled between each pair, they looked like hills and mountains on the move, or a tide of trees. Breathing intently, they swept over the snow, heading for the stranded traina"which the eastern scout had seen from a hill five miles to the northwest. He had then skied down to meet the others, who had set off on a ten-mile race with the sun at their backs.

When the train appeared to them, it seemed to be floating upon the drifts, swamped, and the thin lines of smoke rising from it seemed about to expire. In this strangely immobilized excursion craft were two hundred men, women, and children who needed to be taken to a safe place. Making for them with all their strength, the farmers thought that danger was in truth a lovely thing that had to do with air and clouds and sea.

As they closed, the men on the train began to hear their skis, their breathing, and the sound of the snow compressing as the column moved across it fifty abreast. They thought that it was the wind, risen to mark the sunset. Then they thought that it was an animal. When they finally could see through the glare, they could hardly believe their eyes. From the sheer white, from nothing, from ahundred miles of rolling drifts, an army of nearly silent skiers was closing upon them.

The men on the train cried out, but the sounds that came from their frozen throats were just gurgles and moans, so they began to fire their pistols in the air, one shot after another. Upon hearing this, the Coheeries men began to whoop and cheer as they raced along on their skis. In the cold and smoky pa.s.senger cars, whose windows were silver-gray with piled snow, everyone knew what was happening, and quite a few of them began to weep, laugh, and even pray. The cars erupted in commotion, and those who had imagined that they were lost climbed out the hatches to stand in the open air and greet their rescuers.

Who were these men in homespun and fur? There was no time to explain (they never would) if they were to get back to the settlement without too much traveling at night.

"The moon is full, and it will light up the countryside like a flare," one of the Coheeries men said to the train crew (who had never heard of Lake of the Coheeries)."But it's best to start off in the light, so that those who don't know how to ski can learn when it's warmer. We have skis for everyone, and we'll pull the sick and the children in sleds."

In an hour, everyone was fitted with skis, supplied with fur jackets and woolen anoraks, fed on dried fruit and chocolate, instructed, sledded, and eager to start out. They did not whistle across the drifts as their Coheeries rescuers had done, but, by evening, they were moving at a steady pace.

Three Coheeries men led in a vee, carrying torches for everyone to follow. The others pushed a flat track across forests and fields, migrating in starlight, following the three pitch-pine torches and their ragged orange flames. The moon came up as they were emerging from a huge stand of pine onto a flat ten-mile-wide whitened Plateau. The landscape was glowing, but they kept the torches beause they looked so lovely sparkling ahead, and by that time the Pace had increased and everyone had grown used to chasing the three lights.

The city people, clad now in furs and wool, quickly grew accustomed to the melancholy brush of moonlight and the soft overwhelming light of the stars. They soon grew to love the cold air and the snow, and they quickly forgot why they were there. Their activity was self-justifying, far better than many things they had done before or would do in the future. They quarter-timed across the fields with the aurora borealis faintly green and flas.h.i.+ng off to their right.

Then, from atop a long rise, they saw the village sparkling like a group of colored candles. It was on the edge of the lake, which was crowned by the blue-and-green aurora now hanging in the sky in astounding silent ribbons. Smoke from Coheeries chimneys crept up in intertwining white garlands and tangled on the moon. Now skiers, countrymen, they raced in contentment, hissing down the slope, speeding toward the Christmas candle that danced before them by the frozen lake, and as they skied into the town they saw the people of the village standing on their roofs or in their bright windows.

When skis were stacked near the doorways, families reunited, and groups formed, they went inside to eat and rest. Having been without food for days, many were starry-eyed and entranced. They thought they were in a dream world. How pleasant it was. If they had frozen to death on the train, and this was death, then how lovely, and how much better than any life they had known, for it was something that seemed to be flooded with light, and in it all emotions had an inexplicable buoyancy.

"No," they were told."You're not dead. Far from it."

But they didn't know whether to believe these good people, and when they went inside they yearned to be out again under the stars, in the cold that seemed no longer capable of hurting them.

HARDESTY and four others were escorted through the snow tunnel to Mrs. Gamely's. When he, a cuckoo-clock repairman from Milwaukee, a young Marine, and a married pair of Bengali tourists strained their eyes and peered into the firelit interior of Mrs. Gamely's cottage, they saw Mrs. Gamely standing by the stove, with Jack held in her arms in front of her. The way she looked (with her too-close-together eyes, and an expression of humility and mischief perfectly combined), she might have been a great snowy owl surprised in its nest. She stepped forward and bowed neatly to each of her guestsa"as shyly as a little girl in patent-leather shoes at her first dance in some echoing gymnasium. They reciprocated. They sensed something about Lake of the Coheeries, but didn't know what it was. So they were very cautious, and returned her bows as deferentially as explorers straining to emulate a custom of the bushmen. It occurred to Mrs. Gamely to seize upon this unusual willingness to oblige her, and she repeated the greetings. They followed suit. When she went down the line yet again, bowing gracefully each time, they had to respond in the same way. This went on for at least five minutes, until Mrs. Gamely (as bemused as she could be) noticed that one of her guests was missing.

Looking about, she saw a handsome young man sitting at the table, filling one of the new clay pipes. As he watched the bowing, he grew more and more delighted at Mrs. Gamely's sense of play. From that moment on, he understood her.

One might think that the sudden arrival of five unknown guests would prompt a flood of talk from an old woman who had been alone for more than a year, especially if she, like Mrs. Gamely, had a vocabulary of six hundred thousand words. But she had many hours each day in which to talk to Jack and to herself, and since she was the only one in the world who could understand exactly what she was saying without raping the dictionary as she spoke, she seldom unleashed her full range of words on pa.s.sersby. Instead, she devoured their speech, milking them like cows for the secrets of their dialects and regional usages. She put five new words in her store from the cuckoo-clock repairman alonea"escambulint, tintinex, walatonian, srnerchoo, and f.u.c.k-head (all of which, save the last, were Milwaukee terms referring to the various parts of cuckoo clocks). The Bengalis were a gold mine. Their English, like waving silks and birdsong, so entranced Mrs. Gamely that she pushed them on and on until they nearly collapsed because they could hardly get anything to eat.

"What do you call that, in your country?" Mrs. Gamely would ask pointing, for example, to a steaming loaf of Coheeries bread."Bread," answered the husband.

"Must be variants," Mrs. Gamely insisted.

"Well, yes," they chirped together, and the husband went on "When a little fellow wants bread, he says, *Ta mi balabap.' *

"Balabap?"

"Yes. Balabap."

"And what do you call a policeman who takes bribes?"

"A jelby."

"And a broken weir upon which swans nest?"

"A swatchit-hock."

So it went as she fed them milky-white Coheeries bread, venison stew, roasted Canadian bacon, and a tureen of mixed vegetables in venison broth. She apologized profusely for not having any salad. The worst thing about winter was that there was no salad, and try as they did the local people could not find a way to preserve ita"by freezing or otherwise. For dessert, she had baked a batch of blueberry-walnut-chocolate cookies with cherry-brandy centers. But because there were six for dinner, she had used up all of her platters, and had nothing upon which to serve the cookies. Alert to the importance of such things to women of advancing age, Hardesty reached into his pack and pulled out the salver.

Either because it had been polished as it had moved around in the pack, or because it was somehow changing, it seemed more dazzling than it had ever been. When he held it for them to see, they took in their breaths, for it caught the flamelight and the yellow glow of the kerosene lantern like a mythical s.h.i.+eld, and its rays struck out in all directions, as busy and alive as the lightscape of a great city. What entranced them most was not the glimmering gold, but that here was a still thing which moved. It was molten, calculating, changing in front of their eyes.

"That is a beautiful plate," said the Bengali woman.

"Too beautiful just for cookies," Mrs. Gamely added."I couldn't use a salver like that for serving cookies."

"Why not?" asked Hardesty."It's not delicate. Hardly that. My brother threw it out of a seven-story window onto concrete ana it wasn't even scratched. It's pure gold. It won't stain or tarnish. 1 wouldn't mind if you used it for serving up roast beef. Something like this, which is of the highest order, can do even the humblesttasks. That's true about words, isn't it, Mrs. Gamely? They serve peasants as well as kings."

He tossed it upon the table, where it rang for two minutes as it settled down like a spinning golden sovereign, and warmed everyone's face as if it were a coal fire.

Mrs. Gamely went to the oven and got out the cookies. As she placed them around the salver, Hardesty read and translated the virtues. When Mrs. Gamely began to lay the cookies across the plate, Hardesty read the inscription in the center.

"Does it really say that?" she asked."*For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone'?"

"Yes," Hardesty answered.

"I see." She covered the inscription with a line of cookies, and did not mention it again.

That night, as she lay in her bed upstairs, thinking about her charges sprawled on mats and blankets in the main room the way Virginia's friends had done in the past at their pillow parties, she wondered about things she had heard as a little girl, about certain beauties that she had once been promised would arise. And with tremendous excitement and fear, she thought that these promises might come true in her lifetime, after all. She had long given up on them for herself, and hoped only that Virginia or Martin would see them. She had once believed in miracles, s.h.i.+ning cities, and a golden age. She had learned, however, soon enough, that such things were only illusions. But now she wasn't quite sure. A great ma.s.sy wheel seemed once again to be turning. Or was it a vain and foolish misinterpretation of her past? Probably. But, no. No. The lake had frozen. And the start of the third millennium was drawing near. Perhaps it was not an illusion, for the lake had frozen early and as black as a mirror only one other time.

It was when she was a child, and the Penns had come from the city to bury Beverly Penn on their island. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the cold night not long after the Penns had returned to New York, when she had been awakened by the pull of the stars, which hissed and crackled like an icy waterfall, and were dancing all over the sky, brighter than she had ever seen them. She was only four or five, and had to stand on tiptoe to see out the window. It was then, as she looked over the lake, that she had learned the true mean-ing of the word "arise."

THE day that Hardesty arrived in New York was cold and dry Nevertheless, tentative whirlwinds of snow sometimes swept the avenues, twisting about in gray light. The city had not yet been interred in its January shroud, and the fact that the streets were still bare gave December the air of fall, just as reluctant s...o...b..nks can give the air of December even to May.

This was the first city he had ever seen that immediately spoke for itself, as if it had no people and were a system of empty canyons cutting across the desert in the west. The overwhelming ma.s.s of its architecture, in which time crossed and mixed, did not ask for attention shyly, like Paris or Copenhagen, but demanded it like a centurion barking orders. Great plumes of steam a hundred stories tall, river traffic that ran a race to silver bays, and countless thousands of intersecting streets that sometimes would break away from the grid and soar over the rivers on the flight path of a high bridge, were merely the external signs of something deeper that was straining hard to be.

Hardesty knew right off that an unseen force was breathing under all the gray, that the events and miracles of the city were simply the effect of this force as it turned in its sleep, that it saturated everything, and that it had sculpted the city before it had even opened its eyes. He felt it striving in everything he saw, and knew that the entire population, though prideful of its independence, was subject to a complete and intense orchestration the likes of which he had never imagined. They rushed about here and there, venting their pa.s.sionsa"struggling, kicking, and shuddering like marionettes. Ten minutes after he left the station, he saw a taxi driver kill a peddler in an argument over who had the right of way on an empty street. He wanted no part of this city. It was too gray, cold, and dangerous. It was perhaps the grayest, coldest, most dangerous city in the world. He understood why young people from all over came to pit themelves against it. But he was too old for such things, and he had already been to war.

Furthermore, his intention was to look throughout Europe for beautiful city that (momentarily, at least) might be entirely just. In such a city all forces would smoothly align, and all balances would be brought even. That would never occur in this ragged place of too much energy and too many loose ends that lashed about like taut cables which suddenly are parted. New York could never be fully at peace with itself; nor could any one vision defeat, compress, and control its crooked and varied time, for this would require the perfect and able recognition of signal beauties, and a gift of unforeseen grace. Never would New York know perfect justice, despite the greatness of its views and its well-plotted interweaving of the magnificent andthe small.

For Hardesty, who was in poor spirits after a long and difficult train journey in which he had zigzagged over half of Pennsylvania and been shunted for hours into industrial towns where there were only liquor stores and snowmobile repair shops, New York was a difficult city, far too rich in the ugly, the absurd, the monstrous, the hideous, and the unbearable. Everything capable of being exaggerated or distorted, was. Normally acceptable customs and occurrences were changed into startling nightmares. The very life functions were transformed. Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible. Battalions of heinous voluptuaries corrupted eating into a sport of pigs. s.e.x was for sale as a commodity, like roasted peanuts or manganese. Even elimination, never the most regal thing, was dragged down to baser levels by snorting, grunting dilapidations who squatted mercilessly upon the sidewalk in full public view.

But then the wind changed, the light came out, and he was caught up in some sort of magic. For no apparent reason, he suddenly became king of the world, and was overflowing with the schemes and riches of mania. His heart was pumping so vigorously that he thought he was undergoing an attack. Though suddenly ecstatic, he retained enough presence of mind to try to determine why his emotions had flipped upside down. He thought it might have had something to dowith the city itself, since everyone he could see was either weeping at death's door or dancing with hat and cane. The city seemed to have no middle ground. Certainly the poor were poor and the rich were rich as nowhere else. But, here, wealthy women in sables and diamonds sifted through garbage cans, and paupers who slept above subway gratings strutted down the street declaiming furiously about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve. He saw great numbers of men who were women, and women who were men. And, in Madison Square Park, there were two lunatics in bedsheets, circling one another like fighting c.o.c.ks, screaming that they had found a magic mirror.

Hardesty decided to deposit his check in a reputable bank and figure out later whether he would stay for a while in New York or immediately go to Italy on one of the many steams.h.i.+ps the deep whistles of which he could hear as they started downriver and across the sea more casually than canoes on a millpond. In San Francisco, walking into a bank was like walking into a palacea"which was the way it should have been. But in New York, banks were cathedrals, which was perhaps not the way it should have been. If a law had been pa.s.sed to change each bank into a church and each second vice-president into a priest, New York would instantly have become the center of Christendom. Hardesty slapped down his gambling check on a waxed marble counter in the Tenth Street branch of the Hudson and Atlantic Trust.

The teller appraised it with a professional stare."We're not taking these, " he said."We had a telex this morning instructing us to refuse any checks drawn on Harvesters and Planters in St. Louis. I imagine it's gone under. I suggest that you go to our main office on Wall Street. They might be able to clarify the order."

This complication moderated Hardesty's mania, and though he found himself on an even keel when he walked into the Hudson and Atlantic headquarters in the financial district, the only reaction appropriate for its interior was a gasp of wonder. A cream-colored marble floor stretched away like the wheat fields of Kansas. Messengers on bicycles carried doc.u.ments and dispatches over it from one department to another. When a small child deliberately released a toyhelium balloon, everyone watched it drift up to the ceiling, where it seemed as small as a grain of sand.

A bank officer who didn't like the way Hardesty was dressed told him, showing a newspaper to prove it, that the St. Louis bank had failed."You have three choices, " he said."You can hang onto the check and become a creditor (or hope that someday they'll get back on their feet), you can sell it as an acceptance for about a cent and a half on the dollar, or you can tear it up."

Hardesty thought it best to rent a safe deposit box in which to store the discredited check. Perhaps in twenty years, like a locust, it would rise to fly. And, if he could lease a box wide enough, he would put the salver in it tooa"since he did not fancy carrying around many pounds of gold and silver in a city where, it was said, every tenth citizen was a thief.

Deep below the wheat-field floor were marble chambers and barred cages. Hardesty found himself in a little cell with an enormous metal box, in which he placed the salver and the check. He looked up. From all around came chants and tones, as if prayers were being said in the warrens of a Tibetan monastery. A score or more of middle-aged men in cells like his own were counting their coupons and their certificates in low voices imbued with the gravity of final reckoning. He leaned back in his chair, lit his pipe, and listened. The sounds of shuffling and counting were as tranquil as the lapping or a lake. The occasional shuddering metallic rattle of steel grates, and of locks set and unset, made long-lasting echoes, and the whir of combination wheels was like the purring of a cat. In the dimly litcell, Hardesty watched his pipe smoke wind to the ceiling. He stayed there for several hours, thinking about what he had to do next.

In his pocket was a long letter in his own handwriting fromMrs. Gamely to Virginia. The letter itself was a puzzle, being beautiful yet utterly incomprehensible unless one were to have the humiliating experience of using a dictionary to understand one's own language. It read like a runic ode, but was dotted here and there with plain English gossip, quotations, recipes, and news about the condition of crops, lake, and various forms of animals identified by name and species (Grolier the Pig, Concord the Goose, etc. ).

Mrs. Gamely had taken him aside and dictated it to him, rnaking him promise to deliver it personally, because, as she said,"Coheeries mail is heteronomic and ludibund." The problem was that Virginia's mail, whether or not heteronomic and ludibund, did not get through, and her whereabouts were a mystery. But Mrs. Gamely had made Hardesty swear that he would seek her out before he left New York. Upon asking what he should do if he could not find her, Mrs. Gamely had replied,"Keep looking." Now, because the bank in St. Louis had failed, Hardesty no longer had as much time as he had thought he would have. He wondered how he would find Virginia Gamely, and he half regretted that he had agreed to do so.

But that is not to say that he was not pleased with the city, and with the prospect of searching through it.

SOON it was dark, and people were gathering for dinner or hot drinks in restaurants and cafes with slanted gla.s.s awnings that were covered with snow. But Hardesty pa.s.sed by these places and did not come in from the cold until he came to the library. This was the deepest place in the city, for its hundred million isles were further subdivided into countless patterns, chapters, themes, words, and letters. The letters were merely lines derived from a series of coordinates, which the eye pieced together and united in a riverlike flow, as if all the bent and convoluted little sticks were the lights of a cityscape that was beautiful from afar. In fact, when Hardesty walked among the books that lined the high walls of the main reading room, he felt as if he were walking into a city. The plain of tables and readers flanked on four sides by tall rectangular bookcases was a parody of Central Park, especially since the reading lamps were as green as gra.s.s.