The action of part 3 picks up, naturally in the midst of a brutal – yet beautiful – winter.  It’s the first such winter after “several” years without any real, proper winters.  (Helprin is playing loosely with time here, but, given what he told us in the previous chapter, that’s hardly a surprise).  But for pedantry’s sake: Virginia arrived in Manhattan at the end of 1994 (we can be relatively certain of this because Hardesty arrives at Mrs. Gamely’s home during the second brutal Coheeries winter in a row, and he doesn’t end up there until a few months after September of 1995),  So by “several years” Helprin can’t mean more than two, because we’re in 1998 now).

We step back into the plot aboard the Staten Island Ferry.  The boat is stuck in the ice of the harbor and returning to Manhattan, when a passenger spots something fall from the sky with a bright streak of light.  He points out where he saw it land, and, sure enough, someone is out there.  A wounded man, with sword cuts all over his body, and, he thinks, possibly bullet wounds, too.  But he doesn’t know who he is, who might have given him the wounds, or how he ended up in the harbor (Helprin doesn’t play with the reader, though – he tells us that this is Peter Lake right from he start).

Peter doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror, and passes out just as he’s brought to a waiting ambulance when the ferry docks.  He wakes up sometime later, handcuffed to a bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same hospital Hardesty makes a note of when he walks past it a couple of chapters ago).  He can’t understand what’s going on – he doesn’t recognize plastic, or the computer monitors showing his vital signs, and when one of the doctors mentions identifying him via fingerprints, he has no idea what those are.  He’s sedated after he mouths off at the doctor, and doesn’t wake again for five days.  When he does, he’s no longer chained to the bed, and he finds a strange young woman at his bedside.  He assumes she’s a teenager, probably from another ward of the hospital (due to the “slingshot” in her pocket that he doesn’t recognize as a stethoscope; and also due to the fact that, being used to the world of 1915, he has no idea that women can be doctors).

After a confused, but pleasant, conversation, she sedates him again.  When he awakes the next time – much sooner than she expects, and almost completely healed, although that ought to be impossible – he realizes that she truly is a doctor.  He also takes note of the monitors and how their lights and beeping correspond to his activity.  He begins to form an idea, that it is no longer 1915.  He impresses the doctor by his healing, and also by his knowing what time it is despite not having a clock nearby.  He can tell by the sound of the police horses – it’s a shift change, and knowing how far the hospital is from the stables.  And the doctor confirms he’s correct.  But he throws her for a loop when he asks about the El.  She has no idea what he’s talking about.  He explains – elevated trains.  But there aren’t any.

“Oh, maybe in the Bronx, or Brooklyn somewhere.  But not in downtown Manhattan.”

Certainly not in 1998.  Peter convinces her to let him see for himself.  She unhooks his IV, and, when he asks, tells him what year it is.  Then she leads him to the roof.

“If this is a joke, I’ll kill you,” she said, wondering how she could believe what she believed and think what she had thought.

Peter visualizes what he knows ought to be out there when the door opens.  But he knows it’s not so.

“It’s funny,” Peter Lake stated.  “I don’t think that this notion I have could be so, but I’m afraid to open the door.”

“Just push it,” she said.

He did.

And we end on that.  We know what Peter will see, but I love the way Helprin leaves us just at that moment without going farther.  It’s a perfect ending to the chapter.

And now we’ve got both Peter and Athansor in the modern world, ready to take their places alongside Virginia and Hardesty and everyone else we met in part 2.  We also know for certain now (as with Athansor) that the transition from 1915 to the end of the 20th century was instantaneous; they both return with all the wounds they suffered in the fight against Pearly on the Brooklyn Bridge still fresh.

The one criticism I have of this chapter is that Peter’s doctor is a one-shot character.  We don’t get a name for her, and we won’t see her again in the book, which is a shame.  She’s a great character, and I’d personally like to know a lot more about her.  And I think she could easily have played some sort of role in the events that will come.

But we’ll have to leave her behind, and pick up the story of Hardesty and Virginia in the next chapter…

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We’re onto part 3 of the book now, which is titled “The Sun…and the Ghost”.  We’re a little past the halfway mark of the book, and by the end of this part, the plot is going to speed up quite a bit.  Before that, though, we’re going to meet an old friend, and get some history on the two great newspapers of Helprin’s New York City.

Before that, though, we have a very short (2 pages) prologue chapter to this section of the book, in which the author makes explicit some of the things we’ve been discussing throughout the novel.  Basically, he addresses the paradox between predestination and free will.

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be

This is how he opens the chapter, and then Helprin gives us a litany of examples, from the weather, to the daily routine of the milkman to the behavior of individual electrons

going precisely where they are supposed to go.

How is that to be squared with what Helprin terms “wonderful anarchy” ?  As he puts it:

the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will.

Helprin’s answer?

Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.  No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas we have been given

And he directly says what some of his characters have theorized: time can be transcended, if only one steps back far enough to see it all.

The universe is still and complete.  Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is – and so on, in all possible combinations.

And he comes around to justice; the final words of this very brief chapter are:

when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time,justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

 

Almost everyone in the book is seeking justice, perfection, the promised land.  And Helprin has just given us the secret of how to find it…

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We’re coming to the end of part 2, and our final new character.  She’s a young woman by the name of Christiana Friebourg, and we meet her – in good Helprin fashion – in a flashback.  She’s remembering her grade-school days, and one event in particular: the time that everyone in her class had to write an essay about their favorite animal and read it aloud.

Christiana has a favorite animal, the memory of whom is so overwhelming that it almost brings her to tears.  She doesn’t talk about him, though – but she does drift back (giving us another Helprin specialty, the flashback within a flashback) and we see her meeting with him.  She’s walking home from picking blueberries, on the beach, , when she sees something fall from the sky on a trail of mist and land in the ocean.  Our in the water, she sees what it was – a horse.

A very particular white horse.  She swims out to him, and nearly drowns for her trouble.  But, eventually, after throwing herself onto the horse’s back, he – after initially trying to throw her off – accepts her and brings her safely to land.

She sees just how massive he is (she can walk beneath him and not hit her head) and she sees the many wounds that he – apparently recently – has suffered.  He then begins galloping, and jumping, up and down the beach, farther and higher with each effort, until, at last, he literally leaps up and flies into the air, and is gone.  Although Christiana doesn’t know it, she’s just met Athansor, and she’s the first person in this era to do so.

We go from that scene of amazement to the present (more or less) of the story, and our first glimpse at the inimitable Craig Binky, owner of the New York Ghost (he’s been mentioned previously, but this is our first chance to properly meet him).  Craig is an ill-mannered, barely literate, completely deranged buffoon (as we’ll see in the next part of the book, the Ghost is modelled – sort of – on the New York Post, and Binky is an exaggerated version of Rupert Murdoch).  But he’s got a certain charm despite all that.

At the moment, he’s been asked by the manager of his club if he’s got room in one of his many properties for a young woman who works at the club and who will need lodging after the club closes in October.  Binky evades the question, but his friend, real estate magnate Marcel Apand (whose company symbol is an upraised monkey fist – “ape hand”) suggests getting a look at the girl first.

The girl, of course, is the grown-up Christiana, who’s beautiful.  Marcel seizes the opportunity, and Christiana is soon ensconced first aboard his yacht and then in one of his many homes.  Helprin makes it clear that, while Marcel uses her for arm candy, that’s all she’s being used for – she’s not sleeping with him.  But, nonetheless, this is no life for her.  She wants to escape Marcel, and to get to know New York.  The city:

was alive, and she wanted to know it, even if it meant the risk of losing herself within it.  Because there were all kinds of hell – some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.

We jump ahead to an especially hot night in August.  We briefly visit Hardesty and Virginia, who are overcome with crazed desire, and make love ” like powerful engines, forges, furnaces.”  This harks back to the description of Peter and Beverly making love after the New Year’s Eve party at Mouquin’s, just as much else about Hardesty and Virginia mirrors their relationship.

At the same time, Asbury Gunwillow is unable to sleep; and we drop in on several other characters, and then we return to Christiana and Marcel, who are on an expedition.

They’re headed – in several armored limos) to the “city of the poor” to see what they can see.  On the way, they discuss these horrible slums, which are always burning.  One of their companions thinks that, one day, there will be a reckoning:

“I mean a shudder of anger that will make itself heard in Heaven, a fire that will leave only rubble and glass.”

And Marcel has an answer:

“We’ll rebuild.  Let it come.  We’ll rebuild.”

Keep that in mind when we get to the last couple of chapters of the book…

In the meantime, what they encounter is a makeshift arena in which gladiator-like men fight horses to the death.  The spectacle is horrifying.  Christiana wants to run away, but she’s trapped there:

She had no will, but only eyes, as in a dream.

Two horses are slaughtered, but then a third comes out, a huge white stallion – Athansor.  Christiana sees that he could easily break free of the arena, but he chooses to stay, and to fight.  When he’s killed every one of the horse-fighters, Marcel and company take their leave of this atrocious place.  But when she returns home, she does not sleep.  Instead, she gathers her belongings, some food, and all the money in Marcel’s petty cash jar (thirty-two hundred dollars) and leaves.

In the morning, somewhat to her amazement, she finds both an apartment (next door to Asbury, as it turns out) and a job (as a part-time maid in Harry Penn’s home).  We meet Boonya, another of the Penn servants, every bit as cheerfully insane as the ones eighty years before (her litany of recipes for non-existent foods is very entertaining).  And she gets to know – without ever seeing – her new neighbor.

Over the course of the winter, they fall in love, solely based on conversation.  Christiana and Asbury agree to meet on the first fine day of spring, which ends up being in June.  They go up, and despite their fears, things go better than either could have imagined:

Then she rose in one quick movement, and stood before the lover that she had never seen.  She was more than pleased.  And he was stunned.

“I knew it,” he said, in triumph, struggling to take her in all at once.  “I knew that you would be the most beautiful woman in the world.  And, goddamnit,” he said, stepping back a pace so as not to be overwhelmed, “you are.”

And that’s where we end.  True love, patience and faith being rewarded, high expectations being not merely met but vastly exceeded.  And the return of Athansor, which begs the question of who else from the past might turn up in late 1990’s Manhattan?

We’ll find out very quickly in part 3 of the book…

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