Onwards we push, and we’re about to meet a new and very important character, in a chapter named for her.  Connections are becoming clearer, and seeds planted in earlier chapters will begin to bear fruit here.

We open with a description of the Penn family, and their home overlooking the Central Park reservoir.  There’s Isaac, the patriarch, as well as publisher and owner of the New York Sun (technically, as we’ll see in part two, it’s really two newspapers: the New York Morning Whale, and the New York Evening Sun), who spent much of his childhood and young-adulthood on a whaling ship.

Then there are his four children: Harry (who will one day follow in Isaac’s footsteps), Jack, three-year-old Willa, and eighteen-year-old Beverly.  We hear Beverly before we see her; she’s practicing on the piano when an optometrist arrives to examine her and make her a new pair of glasses.  Our first view of her is through his eyes (I think there’s something symbolic here – we first see Beverly through the lens of a man whose job is to make lenses – but I’m honestly not sure exactly what Helprin is saying or implying with that).

And then a young woman appeared in the doorway, apparently blushing, with cheerful eyes that stared in the direction of the ice-clad windows.  She breathed as if she had a fever, and the expression on her face suggested a pleasant delirium.  Her golden hair was lit so brilliantly in a crosslight that it appeared to be burning like the sun.

Beverly, of course, is suffering from consumption (no spoiler; we’ll find out on the very next page) – just as Peter Lake’s parents did.  And note the description of her hair – golden, burning like the sun.  Exactly as the clouds appeared to be burning with gold in the first chapter, when the horse so desperately wanted to cross over to them.  And just as in the golden room that Pearly Soames envisioned.  What does it imply about Beverly that she carries with her that same gold?

The optometrist examines Beverly, and in the course of his work, he observes that she is in fact consumptive.  He also determines that her vision is perfect.  Isaac protests that she’s worn glasses since she was a young child, but the optometrist answers:

“What can I tell you?  She doesn’t need them now.”

Just as her fever and her bouts of delirium have sharpened her vision of the universe, allowing her to see things that others can’t (more on that in a moment), so, too, her literal vision has been sharpened to perfection.

After the examination, there’s a family dinner, and then Beverly prepares for bed.  This is quite involved, because she sleeps out on the roof.  Due to her illness, heat and closed rooms are tantamount to a death sentence for her, and she requires  the fresh, cold air of the outdoors.  The Penns’ wealth provides for a sleeping arrangement worthy of an Arctic expedition, with every kind of cold-weather clothing and gear imaginable.  Beverly ascends to her perch, and commences to look at the stars:

not for ten minutes or a quarter-hour as most people did, but for hour after hour.  Even astronomers did not take in the sky with such devotion, for they were constantly occupied with charting, measurements, the fallabilties of their earthbound instruments, and concentration upon one or another celestial problem.  Beverly had the whole of it; she could see it all.

In her long hours observing the sky, Beverly sees things that she doesn’t understand – at first, she doesn’t even realize she’s seeing them.  She remembers waking up one morning to find a notebook filled with equations, all in her own handwriting, but which she doesn’t remember writing.  She brings them to the planetarium and shows them to an expert, who finds them fascinating.  When he asks her what they mean to her, she replies:

“They mean to me that the universe growls, and sings.  No, shouts.”

He presses her on the point:

“How, exactly?”

“Like a dog, but low, low.  And then it shouts, mixed voices, tones, a white and silver sound.”  The astronomer’s eyes were already wide, but she made his heart thud when she said, “The light is silent, but then it clashes like cymbals, and arches out like a fountain, to travel and yet be still.  It crosses space, without moving, on a fixed beam, as cleanly and silently as a pillar of ruby or diamond.”

Compare this with Peter Lake’s thoughts on his refuge in the “back of the sky” in the previous chapter.

And it’s here that we leave Beverly, as her attention returns to her present, falling asleep on a snowy, frozen rooftop, one consumptive among a legion of them:

They were there, each one alone – as all will someday be – in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

Even if you didn’t know from the back cover of the book that Peter Lake and Beverly Penn were going to meet and experience an extraordinary love, it ought to be clear from this chapter and the previous one that they’re meant for each other.  It’s also clear that the fate of the world – of worlds – may hinge on their love and what becomes of it.  We’ll begin to get into that in the next chapter…

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I warned you a couple of chapters ago that there are some beastly long chapters in this book, and we’ve got one of them right here.

We also have an example of Helprin’s unconcern with traditional narrative devices.  This chapter is an extended flashback – a recounting of Peter Lake’s life from infancy up to the present (a point that we last left back at the end of chapter 2).  But it’s not immediately obvious that it is a flashback, not until a few pages in, when the Baymen make their appearance and it becomes clear what’s going on.

So: we open on a ship anchored a mile or so off of Governors Island, gateway for immigrants to the United States.  There are a hundred or so people on deck, in a state something close to shock.  In a flashback within a flashback, we learn why: they hoped to come to America, but, upon examination on Governors Island, they were turned back.  For a young couple with an infant son, the reason was disease – specifically consumption, which is notable for reasons that we’ll come to in the next chapter.  We also get a physical description of Peter Lake’s parents – his father has

eyes as blue as the wet blue cups in a palette of watercolors

Keep that in mind when we get to the first meeting of Peter and Beverly Penn in a couple of chapters.

The parents try to convince someone to take their son, to let him grow up in America, even if it’s without them, but they have no luck.  Eventually, however, they come up with a solution, when the father happens upon a four foot long miniature model of the ship in a meeting room.  It turns out to be seaworthy, and just the right size to build a tiny bed into.  Young Peter is put in the boat, lowered into the water and sent on his way, calling to mind (I admit that neither of these thoughts occurred to me; I read them in other reviews of the book, but they’re so obvious that I don’t know how I missed them) the story of Moses, and also of baby Kal-El, sent away from Krypton to escape its destruction.

I suspect that Helprin had both those tales in mind.  An infant is sent away to be raised in another culture, where he will forever be an outsider, but also have abilities/gifts that nobody else shares – that certainly applies here.

Peter is found by a group of three Baymen who are fishing; they take him in and, without any discussion, bring him back, to be raised as one of them.  For the next twelve years, Peter learns everything the Baymen have to teach (including swordfighting, which Peter takes to immediately).  But then he’s sent away to Manhattan, where after a very stressful first day, he comes upon two women dancing in a park – spielers, who also pick pockets to supplement their income – and he falls in with them (literally, once they arrive back at the hovel the spielers call home).

Peter learns one important lesson with them, when he sees passers-by throwing money to them as they dance, when he would have danced anyway, just for the fun of it:

to be paid for one’s joy is to steal

And he’s set on the path to becoming a master thief.  But there are some bumps on that path.  The next day, he wanders into a sales exhibition of industrial machines, and becomes entranced by them (It’s far too long to type out, but the sales pitch for the Barkington-Payson Semi-Automatic Level-Seeking Underwater Caisson Drill and Dynamite Spacer is a thing of wonder).  His wonderment is interrupted by the police, who snatch Peter up and take him to his home for the next several years, Reverend Overweary’s Home for Lunatic Boys.  There, he meets another mentor: the Very Reverend Mootfowl, who is:

forever at the forge or workbench, crafting, cutting, designing.  He lived steel, iron, and timber.  he could fabricate anything.  he was a mad craftsman, a genius of tools.

He’s more than that, too, but that’s for later chapters.  For now, he’s simply Peter’s guiding star.  All is well for a while, although Peter isn’t quite sure where he fits into the grand scheme of things:

He was not really a Bayman, not really Irish, and only partly one of Mootfowl’s boys, since, unlike the gamy five-year-olds who were to be seen in a corner of the shed, learning to work with miniature tools, he had been apprenticed relatively late.  He was not sure to what he had to be loyal.

Matters come to a head when the famous bridge-builder Jackson Mead comes to New York to start a new bridge – having just arrived after the mysterious cloud wall had cut the city off for weeks.  Mootfowl is beyond excited at this development, because bridges are, to him, sacred:

When a catenary of steel a mile long is hung in the clear over a river, believe me, God knows.

Helprin has told us this already, and it’s more than just flowery language.  Attracting the notice of God is the whole point of Jackson Mead’s bridges.  And Mootfowl has a plan to gain employment on this latest effort – he brings all his boys to Mead, and proposes a test: select an appropriately difficult task, assign it to any of the boys, and if he should perform it adequately, then Mead will hire the lot of them.  Mead, who is a striking and powerful man (six foot eight with snow-white hair and mustache, and an aura to match), agrees, and selects the boy who he deems the weakest of the bunch, young Cecil Mature.

Poor Cecil performs disastrously, and Mootfowl and company trudge away in defeat:

Their single-file walk back to the workshop was taken by many to be a funeral procession without a corpse.

But there will be a corpse: after a few days of despondent lethargy, Mootfowl calls Peter in to assist him on a new project, a strange wood-and-metal device in his office.  Peter has no idea what it’s for, but trusting Mootfowl, he helps out enthusiastically.  Finally, Mootfowl orders Peter to strike an iron bar with a sledgehammer.  Peter does so, then only belatedly discovers what the device was for: it was Mootfowl’s means of suicide, via the iron bar that has impaled Mootfowl and pinned him to the wall.  Needless to say, Peter runs for his life, and young Cecil Mature joins him.

After a short time on the lam, and just when the heat over Mootfowl’s death has begun to cool down, Peter and Cecil are at a saloon when they meet Pearly Soames, new chief of the Short Tails (having recently killed the previous leader; one can only imagine how insecure it would feel to have Pearly as one’s lieutenant!).  Pearly makes Peter and Cecil an offer they dare not refuse, and they become Short Tails.

We then get a few pages on the Short Tails, and a digression into some of the arcane criminal subspecialties they have refined into art forms, before catching up to the meeting in the Cemetery of the Honored Dead from the last chapter, and Peter’s betrayal.  As we already knew, he warns the Baymen of Pearly’s plot, and so, when the Short Tails attack, the Baymen are ready, and 97 of the 100 Short Tails are slain.  Only Peter, Cecil and Pearly survive.  And it’s Peter’s act of saving Cecil that alerts Pearly to the fact that he is the one who betrayed the gang.

Peter can only watch, helplessly, as Pearly rebuilds the Short Tails and goes on the hunt for him, and then we jump back to the present, with Peter and the horse.  As they gallop through the streets of Manhattan, they discover together that the horse can jump – or really, fly, since we’re talking about soaring over an entire city block in one go.  And then Peter stops, dismounts and asks the horse, “What are you?”  He gets an answer:

The horse then turned to look at him, and, he saw with a chill, that they eyes were infinitely deep, opening like a tunnel to another universe.

Which might well be literally true.  After that, Peter decides to head for a refuge he’s built for himself

above the barrel of the sky, atop the glowing constellations.

It’s located above the ceiling of Grand Central Station, where the architects created constellations of stars high up (did J.K. Rowling take the idea for the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall at Hogwarts from this scene?).  Above the stars, Peter has a space with a bed, a larder, running water, a stove to cook with, and an escape mechanism.

Peter Lake was one of the few who knew that beyond the visible universe were beams and artifice, a homely support for that which seemed to float.  And he had returned by craft and force to the back of the sky, where once in another life he had helped to forge the connections between the beams, to rest now amid the props of the designers’ splendid intentions.

Wow.

It’s clear, to me at least, that this is meant to be taken both literally and figuratively – this will play out over the course of the book, and keep this passage especially in mind when we get to the very end.

Peter’s refuge is not unknown to all, however – after thirty-six hours of much-needed sleep, he’s awoken by the approach of a gang.  Not the Short Tails, but another gang, the Dead Rabbits.  Thankfully, they intend Peter no harm, they just want to buy the horse (and enter him either in the circus or as a thoroughbred at Belmont).  Peter eventually makes it clear to them that the horse is not for sale at any price, and then he decides, once and for all, to make an end to the life of constant pursuit.  He considers various ways in which he might do so, including the example of St. Stephen, who

changed form before the eyes of those who watched, that he could rise in the air and be many things, that he knew the past and future, that he traveled from one time to another, though he was a simple man.

Helprin will come back to St. Stephen in part 3 of the book, but compare his attributes to what you’ll see Peter Lake do in the next few chapters, as well.  In the meantime, Peter purposes to:

steal enough money so that he could set himself up and try to become something other, and perhaps better, than what he was.

And the chapter ends with this musing from Peter:

“With all that I’ve seen,” Peter Lake said to himself, “I’ve seen nothing.  The city is like an engine, an engine just beginning to fire itself up.”  He could hear it.  Its surflike roar matched the lights.  Its ceaseless thunder was not for nothing.

Everything we talked about in the introduction and first chapter is here – building connections across time and worlds, New York City as a giant machine, and also as a single giant organism, the desire to cross worlds, to get back to another, better world – Heaven, maybe.

And in the next chapter, we’re about to meet someone who will change Peter Lake’s life completely…

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Onwards we go, and in this chapter we get an extended look at one of the villains of the book, Pearly Soames.  This is (to me, at least) a fun chapter with some very entertaining moments, and also quite a bit of what some less charitable reviewers might call “padding”.  Personally, I love it, but it is something to be noted.

We open with the author describing the one and only photograph in existence of Pearly Soames and how it came to be – in a police station, with five officers holding him in place for the picture.

Pearly Soames had not desired to be photographed.

He’s quite striking in appearance:

His eyes were like razors and white diamonds.  They were impossibly pale, lucid and silver.  People said, “When Pearl Soames opens his eyes, it’s electric lights.”

He’s also got a remarkable scar, running from his ear to the corner of his mouth:

It had been with him since the age of four, a gift from his father, who had tried and failed to cut his son’s throat.

This is all we hear on the topic, except for a reference to his illegitimacy later in the book, but it says a lot about Pearly.  Pearly is human, more or less, but this passage suggests something a little bit on the “more” side of the question.  What would make a father want to cut a four-year-old’s throat?  And, considering that he cut Pearly deeply enough to leave a lifetime scar, how and why did he fail in the task?  Was Pearly aided?  Was he, even at the age of four, strong enough to fight off a grown man?

However he escaped death, Pearly grew up to be a criminal, the leader of the most feared gang in pre-War New York.  Helprin briefly digresses into a discussion about criminals, and why they may actually be necessary to preserve the equilibrium of society.  Pearly cares nothing for that, although he’s well aware of what he is:

So was Pearly all of these things, knowing at every instant exactly what he was and that everything he did was wrong, possessed with an agonizing account of himself, his mind quick to grasp the meaning of his merciless acts.

This biographical sketch ends with a description I just have to quote:

He was a bomb-thrower, a lunatic, a master criminal, a devil, the golden dog of the streets.

And then we find out what really motivates him, and it’s something we’ve discussed already: color.  And, more specifically, gold.  Not to hoard it as a dragon might, but for an entirely other purpose:

Strange, afflicted and deformed, he sought a cure in the abstract relation of colors.

We get a couple of wonderful pages about Pearly’s “color gravity” (as he refers to it), ending with a brilliant  passage concerning an art theft.  Having sent his Short Tails out to steal several very valuable paintings from an important gallery, Pearly is shocked when he actually sees the art in person.  His men frantically show him, cross-referencing with auction catalogs, that they took the correct paintings (Pearly has quite the temper), and his response is:

“I don’t understand,’ he said, peering at his collection of great and famous names.  “They’re mud, black and brown.  No light in them, and hardly any color.  Who would paint a picture in black and brown?”

Disappointed, Pearly has his men return the stolen art the next night, and he sends along a note which makes the front page of the newspapers, and which ends thusly:

I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil’s opposing tricks, and I know mud.  Mr. Knoedler, you needen’t worry about your paintings anymore.  I’m not going to steal them.  I don’t like them.  Sincerely yours, P. Soames”

Pearly isn’t satisfied with pictures anyway.  What he really wants is to be surrounded by color, to breathe it in:

He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.

Just as the white horse wanted to cross over to that land of gold he saw past the iron gates in chapter one, Pearly wants to live in gold himself.  Neither of them understand why, they just know that they need it.  The difference, of course, is that while the horse merely wants to cross over to the golden world, Pearly wants to trap it in a room where – although he doesn’t say it explicitly – only he and his chosen associates can experience it.

But how do to it?  To obtain so much gold would be impossible.  Or would it?  Here we get another digression, on the topic of gold carriers, the fastest and most secure ships in the world, dedicated solely to ferrying gold, and impossible to rob (or even to catch a glimpse of).  It’s a great passage, and it’s the privilege of a novel to include digressions such as this, even though it slows down the flow of the story (and, remember, we’re still doling out backstory here, as we will in the next chapter, too).

Pearly orders the full 100 members of the Short Tails to convene, and while their meetings are usually conducted in unlikely and dangerous spots (the Statue of Liberty’s crown, the rafters of police headquarters, the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, etc), this meeting will be in the most hazardous spot available: the Cemetery of the Honored Dead:

Pearly had decided that a dead Short Tail deserved to be interred as close to hell as possible, and that the burial should entail as much risk to life and limb as could be imagined (the ultimate honor to the fallen).  Thus, all Short Tails killed in service were transported to crypts at the bottom of the Harlem River siphon.

The crypts are in a small chamber, several hundred feet below ground, past a quarter mile of narrow tunnel, and constantly in danger of being flooded with water from the reservoirs that supply Manhattan’s water.  As one might imagine, the trip into the crypts is both slow and terrifying; it takes three hours for all the Short Tails to assemble for the meeting.  Once there, though, Pearly quickly manages to dispel the gloom by describing his goal of a golden room in which the light will be trapped eternally; and the way in which they will steal the gold to build it.

The Short Tails, including Peter Lake – this is the first time we learn that he was once a member of the gang – are on board with the plan, until Pearly gets to the last step: which involves using the Bayonne Marsh as a drydock to bring the stolen gold carrier so that the gold can be extracted.  It will be necessary, Pearly explains, to wipe out the Baymen who currently live there.

“We’ll go over there in canoes when the men are at work, kill the women and children, and wait in the huts.  When the men come back, we’ll catch them unprepared, and shoot them from behind cover.  There’s no sense in an open battle.”

As strategies go, Pearly’s plan, ruthless as it is, makes a lot of sense.  It probably would have worked, except for one thing that Pearly didn’t know: Peter Lake had been raised by the Baymen, and could not allow them to be slaughtered:

Peter Lake had become forever alienated from the Short Tails, and would have to betray them.  He, and only he, knew that Pearly would never have his golden chamber.

And that’s where we end things.  In the next chapter, we’ll finally learn more about Peter Lake and his life.

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