They were at once so desperate and so determined that they kept their clothes on, and, to get to her, Peter Lake had to go through a stage set of silk and cotton. And once he had found his way and entered her, they stared at one another as if across a dinner table. His carnation was still pinned to his jacket. Her velvet ribbons still hung correctly. They might have been at a formal party, and yet they arose from the same base, and they were pinioned together underneath all the clothes tighter, hotter, and wetter than they had ever been. As if they were dancing, they put their hands on the small of one another’s backs, and moved their fingers slowly up and down the slick surfaces of their clothing. Beverly’s delicate features seemed to rise from a fountain of blue, and the skirts spread over the bed were like the water that had fallen back from the plume.
They weren’t watchful, and wouldn’t have cared if anyone had come into the house. Isaac Penn knew very well what was going on. In other circumstances, it would have been scandalous that the young, fragile, and refined Beverly should be allowed, during her sickness, to know the bittersweet pleasures of a worldly woman. But Isaac Penn recognized that she had fallen in love with Peter Lake, and, despite the risk, wanted her to be free in whatever time she had left to compress the passions that are allowed to us in this life.
She had indeed discovered grace, or madness, in her visions of the starlight. Whichever it was, it frightened her father when she hinted at it or tried to tell him about it, for he knew that young people gifted with long, sharp, and noble vision often paid for it in an early death.
Sometimes, when visiting her on the roof, in the deepest part of the night, he expected to find her asleep, but would instead find her in a breathless trance, possessed, her eyes forced open and fixed on the constellations. “What do you see?” he would ask, frightened for her sanity. “What is it that you see?”
And once, only once, when he found her in the slack and weakened state of someone who had just been seized, broken, and released, she had tried to tell him. He barely understood her when she spoke about a sky full of animals whose pelts were made of an infinite number of stars. They moved slowly and smoothly, for, really, they were motionless. Though their faces could not be seen, they were smiling. There were horses in dark celestial meadows, and other animals that flew, fought, or played—all without moving—in swirling ruby-colored places of complete silence. “Places,” she said, “where we have been.”
“I cannot comprehend this,” answered her father. “The gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far away.”
“Oh no, Daddy,” she had said. “They are here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, they are here.”
BY SPRING, Beverly’s soul had ascended. She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side, and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity. He would never drive from his mind the things she said before she died—ravings about scarves that were songs, torrents of silver sparks, stags with voices like horns, and feasts in fields of black light where the dandelions were suns. And for the rest of his days he would be oppressed by the image of her whitened emaciated body eternally motionless in a dark root-pierced grave—or so he thought.
SHORTLY AFTER Beverly’s death, Isaac Penn followed. One night he called Harry into his bedroom, and said, “I’m dying right now. I feel tremendous speed. I’m frightened. Falling.” And then he died, as if he had been snatched away by some great thing that had been passing at unimaginable speed.
Willa and Jack were farmed out to relatives in the country, the servants were given annuities and dismissed, and the house was sold and soon demolished to make way for a new school. Harry left for Harvard, from which he would then go to the war in France. The Sun stayed much the same, ready for Harry to survive Château-Thierry and the Marne if he could, and return to take charge. Suddenly and sadly, the Penns disappeared from the city. In several strokes, a thriving family was silenced. For Peter Lake, who had never before known loneliness, the city was now empty. But even defeated soldiers sometimes survive. If they make the right motions, they are brought from battle. Peter Lake was left alive.
When there was no one remaining to care for, and nothing more to do, he took Athansor and rode into the Five Points, reckless and angry, trying as best he could to run into Pearly. He wanted to die. But all that summer, as if by magic, he stayed out of Pearly’s way and remained (to his disgust) a free man. He wandered about on Athansor, who, for lack of exercise and sympathy, began to seem more and more like an ordinary white horse that used to drive a milk wagon in Brooklyn. Where Peter Lake went is anyone’s guess, for at times his whereabouts were hidden even from him. The deep maze of the city, its winding streets, tumultuous avenues, and remote squares, circles, and courts with their teeming thousands, swallowed him up easily, and he became one of the great army of the unknown, the ragmen, the wanderers, the ones who cried on the street.
Though he always managed to feed Athansor, and sometimes managed to feed himself, he was never aware of how he did it, except that he could walk down a crowded street and emerge with a hundred dollars that seemed to come from the air but which came, really, from people’s pockets. He hated the idea of this, and fought not to do it. But his hands were more loyal to his stomach than to his head. He had grown ragged, and his clothes were old—but not as old as his face. One day, a wet-eyed young dandy in a sealskin coat approached him and put a bunch of silver coins in his hand, saying, “For you, Father.”
“I’m not your father, you stupid son of a bitch,” was Peter Lake’s reply, but he kept the money.
As uncomfortable as a penitent who has sworn some stupendous oath, Peter Lake wanted to part with the silver. He and Athansor wandered a few miles, and then stopped while a convoy of military trucks crossed their path. It took so long that he dismounted and looked around. He was standing in front of a movie theater, something of which he had recently heard, and he decided to see what was inside.
He was not expecting the darkness to be shattered by a stunning explosion of light. But the perfect square of even white fire upon the wall seemed to have a heart and depth. The light was measured in pulses much more rapid than those of a furnace. He heard the even gait of electrically driven gears, and the flutelike pitch of a high-speed cooling fan that was undoubtedly beneath them. Dust was trapped in the slanted beam of arc-light like a herd of buffalo embarrassed by the intruding lamp of a locomotive, and the particles scattered about the huge hall, transforming it into a universe of mobile stars. How strange it was when the physics and the mystery combined to depict people in ordinary rooms, on the street, or tied to railroad tracks. For half an hour, Peter Lake watched a world of gray in which everything moved too fast and actors spoke in silence. White light filled the room again, and then deferred to a small sketch entitled, “A Winter Scene in Brooklyn—How We Were.”
A village appeared, snow-covered and motionless. Then a horse drawing a sled galloped across the wall and vanished into the curtains. Doors opened, half a dozen women came out, and as if life proceeded in this fashion, they began to churn butter. All at once, they went back in, and the same scene was repeated with men chopping wood, then milkmen delivering milk, boys delivering papers, and a long parade of police chasing a long parade of crooks. All the police were in one group, as were all the crooks.
“What’s ‘were’ about that?” asked Peter Lake indignantly and aloud.
“Shhh!” hissed a woman who had not removed her hat.
Then another white flash struck Peter Lake and pushed him back in his chair. They were to witness a film portrait—“The City in the Third Millennium.” When it came on the screen, Pet
er Lake almost jumped up to shout in anger: this was a film of the painting that had been done for the Penns. Titles announced each moving tableau. “Flight” was a wonder of floating lights traversing the night sky over the city. There were hundreds of these lights, as graceful as schooners but as fast as express trains, tracing lines in the darkness with a remarkable purposefulness. The city had grown upward into cliffs of silver boxes that flashed and glowed and shone out over the water in a rippled musical pattern. Remarkably, most of what was visible in it was light itself. Cold wind raced along the narrow boulevards, jingling the frozen trees. Winter clouds, small and tight, filtered through the ramparts like a river threading through a weir. The clouds moved at a height only about a quarter that of the buildings, and yet they were not low clouds or fog but those high riders that come with strong dry winds. How could this be?
Another title appeared: “As the City of the Future Burns.” Flames could not be seen, only vast banks of illuminated smoke that coiled over the city in braids or swelled like mountains. Then the film broke, and Peter Lake was caught up in blinding white almost as if he were trapped in the backwash of a waterfall crashing into its thundering pool.
Athansor was waiting like a dog tied up outside a store. His silent dispirited master slowly walked him to the east. Athansor’s coat was streaked with soot and dust, and he didn’t look much like a statue anymore. Peter Lake was tired and worn out, and had no place to go. But it was one of those nights in mid-September when, like a cannonade in the distance, Canada threatens winter, and because they had to find shelter they ended up in a cellar, not far from the great bridge. A tallow candle lit a small room in which were a few piles of straw. Athansor stood near one wall, and Peter Lake sat down and rested his back against another. After a while, a man came in and put a bucket of oats and a bucket of water in front of the horse. He left, and returned carrying an iron skillet of grilled fish and vegetables in one hand and two bottles of cold beer in the other. These he put down in front of his guest. “You want hot water in the morning?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Peter Lake. “I haven’t had hot water in a while.”
“Then the lodging for you and the horse, the oats, the hot water, the food, beer, and the candle will be two dollars altogether—two and a half if you don’t want anyone else in here with you. You can pay in the morning. Checkout time is eleven A.M.”
“Checkout time?”
“I used to work in a hotel.”
The fish and vegetables were fresh, the beer ice-cold, and the straw warm and comfortable. Peter Lake was reminded of his first night in the city, with the spielers, when he and they had fallen asleep by the light of a flickering tallow candle. But now there were no women. He thought that he might never touch, love, or be with a woman again. Everything had come apart, and the world was gray rain. With even a harder road ahead than he thought, he fell asleep clutching straw between his fingers, content to be alone in a warm and dirty cellar.
Athansor, on the other hand, stood straight and lifted his head. He was restless, his ears slewed about continuously as if he were keeping track of a mosquito, and his eyes shot back and forth. Had Peter Lake not been lost in sleep, he would have seen that his white horse was tensed like a war-horse who senses a distant battle. There was something in the air, and as the white horse grew more and more alert, astonishing memories began to flood his heart.
MANY HOURS later, Peter Lake had a dream in which he saw himself lying on the straw, with his back against the wooden wall for warmth. Athansor, a white blur in the darkness, was fretting and ill at ease. Peter Lake knew that he was dreaming, and was not surprised when, long before morning, silver light began to flood through the cracks where the cellar walls neared ground level, and the one high window began to frost over as if it were plated with ice and taking the full blast of a beaming December moon. This light grew stronger, like the dawn, but it was much faster, and it had no warm halftones, blood colors, yellows, or oven-whites. Instead, it was all whited silver and blue that grew thicker and brighter as it approached. Had it had the weight of ordinary sunlight, it would have shattered the dream, but being the kind of illumination that seems to make everything float, it only made the dream more profound.
The strengthening silver-blue light was accompanied by a collection of restless sounds. Tones and static battled, entwined in a war that led them upward. Wind and voices were woven into an impenetrable shield. It was the incandescent cloud wall in full agitation, moving toward Manhattan and pushing before it the lost and broken sound and light that would be swept along the island’s edge like amber and sparkling shells driven onto a beach in a necklace-making storm.
But this hurricane had a solid eye, a calm center that would pass over the city in pressureless tranquillity, a shaft of silence with no upward limit. Its approach awakened Peter Lake in his dream, and he sat up with silver flooding his eyes. Athansor could hardly control himself. He was trembling and stomping as if his time had finally come. Frozen motionless, with his eyes at the roof of his soul, Peter Lake could feel Athansor’s inner powers as if they were huge engines and whining turbines.
The wind began to rage from the south. Trees bent and their leaves shuddered in prolonged rushes. Peter Lake heard garbage-can lids pop off and rocket away like artillery shells. The garbage cans themselves were rolling at high velocity along the streets and smashing through store windows, like solid iron projectiles. The timbers of the house rocked and groaned as wind and light raced one another for dominance. Neither won, but the earth trembled as it was swept entirely clean. Then the howling wind stopped, and an all-encompassing calm surrounded the city and shut it down. Nothing moved, neither man nor animal. The waters were still, and all objects seemed rooted in place.
Now the light began truly to flood. It was frightening. It burst upon the harbor in a blinding beam, and tracked toward the city. “It’s a dream, it’s a dream,” Peter Lake told himself over and over even as he trembled. “It’s a dream.” The door to the cellar was lifted gently from its hinges and it flew up, disappearing silently. The silver beam washed down the steps into the straw-filled room and flooded it with cool light.
Suddenly, the light went out, and it was night. Still in the dream, Peter Lake sank back against the wall, able to breathe again. The short time he had to get his wits did him little good, for now he saw. Could it be, even in a dream? Glowing in white, silver, and blue, Beverly was standing at the entrance to the cellar, in a sphere of reverberating beams as round as the moon. She glided down the ramp of light that had brought her. In her hand was a horse’s bridle of what appeared to be chains of stars or sharp diamonds. She was the source of her own illumination, and, next to her, Athansor seemed like a small Shetland. Though he was calmed by her presence, as if he had been expecting it, Peter Lake of the dream fainted dead away. But Peter Lake the dreamer watched as Beverly, her hair plaited in the old fashion, curried Athansor and spoke to him unintelligibly. Her motions and expressions were not unlike those of a girl attending to her pony, but she radiated light.
Peter Lake the dreamer saw Peter Lake of the dream wake, and watch as Beverly finished with Athansor. Then she turned, looked at him directly, and moved toward him. When she was near, he closed his hand around the celestial bridle. Though she smiled and though her eyes danced, she withdrew the bridle. He gripped it so hard that it cut into his hands, but he was unable to hold it, and he felt himself awakening in the dark. He wanted to stay with Beverly in the strangely lighted room full of mysterious curling static and woolly amber tones, but the dream faded, the light was withdrawn, and the last he could remember was a feeling of unutterable pain and loss, and anger at his sentence of darkness.
AN HOUR before the natural light, a strange operation began outside the stable where Peter Lake had dreamed of Beverly. Almost in panic, the Short Tails, their allies, and the allies of their allies, arrayed themselves, their weapons, and their machines in military formations throughout the streets and on the squares. Pearl
y charged from place to place on a spotted gray horse, directing the order of battle. In Brooklyn, one of his lieutenants began to march a body of troops toward the Great Bridge. This was the last mobilization of the gangs before the war swept them away like dust in the wind.
It was a swan song, and the swan that sang it was all bent out of shape. In their decline, the gangs had become repositories for a strange set of criminals. Most of the two thousand soldiers busily assembling were under five feet tall. They did not dash from place to place with the grace of men born to arms, they waddled. Many of the fat ones had Cecil Mature’s slitlike eyes but not his redeeming sweetness. A third of their number was seriously lame, and hobbled about. Another third, or more, made strange “ticky-tacky” sounds. When they talked they sounded like corks popping from champagne bottles, chickens, garglers, and groaning dogs. The ones who were most ordinary were the ferocious-looking cutthroats who in the old days had been called “wild dogs,” because they would recognize no friend, and turned upon one another more easily than could be tolerated by even the most anarchic gangs. Now they were the troops.
Pearly had assembled the remnants of the Short Tails, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Happy Jacks, the Rock Gang, the Rag Gang, the Stable Gang, the Wounded Ribs, the White Switch Gang, the Corlears Hook Rats, the Five Points Steel Bar Gang, the Alonzo Truffos, the Dog Harps, the Moon Bayers, the Snake Hoops, the Bowery Devils, and many others. There were more than two thousand of them, including every independent dirk man, goon, and rougher-upper in the city.