Before we get started on chapter 8, a brief word about the film adaptation, since I saw it again on cable this weekend.  I’d forgotten how much of a mess it was, even ignoring the book.  On its own terms, the movie made no sense at all.  As an adaptation of this novel…well, the less said, the better.

In the novel, we’re up to chapter 8, in which Peter meets Beverly’s family.  It begins, though, with a description of the town of Lake of the Coheeries and its environs, and the spectacular winter it’s experiencing.  We don’t get much about the town itself, or about it’s most curious characteristic, which is shares with the Bayonne Marsh – a tenuous connection with the rest of the world that makes it nearly Brigadoon-like (we’ll see that in some detail in part 2 of the book).

We follow the Penns (sans Beverly) on their journey up to their country retreat, and in a very entertaining passage, we see the telegraph correspondence between Jayga, back in Manhattan and frantic about Beverly’s affair with Peter Lake, and Isaac Penn, who’s issuing instructions to her from afar:

BEVERLY MISSING STOP.  JAYGA SAYS ELOPED WITH SEER STOP.  ADVISE STOP.

WHAT QUESTION MARK EXCLAMATION POINT HIND HER STOP.  CHECK THE ROOF STOP.  LOOK EVERYWHERE STOP.

EVERYONE LOOKING EVERYWHERE STOP.  CANNOT FIND HER STOP.  ADVISE STOP.

LOOK HARDER STOP.

This goes on for a page or two, and while that’s going on, Peter and Beverly reach an understanding.  Peter fears that things have moved too fast, but he discovers – after a long, wordless conversation in which everything imaginable is nonetheless communicated – that he’s wrong.  But he is still unsure about one thing.  Beverly wants to spend New Year’s Eve dancing at Moquin’s – a dancing hall where

all the haut monde, the beau monde and the low monde freely intermix

It’s also a home away from home for Pearly Soames, and obviously Peter is uneasy about that.  Beverly declares that Peter will be safe with her there – or anywhere.  She convinces Peter, and he decides that, even if she’s wrong, it’s worth going anyway:

What the hell, he thought.  It’s the quick turns that mean you’re alive.

That’s one of my very favorite lines from the book.

Before Moquin’s, though, there’s still Christmas to celebrate, and Peter and Beverly travel up the Hudson by boat, and then Athansor pulls their sleigh at impossible speeds the rest of the way.  When they hit the actual Lake of the Coheeries, completely frozen over as it is every winter, they pass by the rest of the Penns, who are speeding in the opposite direction on an iceboat.

Everyone heads back to the Penn country home, and Isaac Penn sits down with Peter.  There’s a bit of wordplay that puts Peter at his ease (mainly concerning the pronunciation of “claret” – this is also one of two scenes in the book that made it more or less intact into the film adaptation).  And then old Isaac lays it on the line:

“You look like a crook.  Who are you, what do you do, what is your relationship with Beverly, are you aware of her special condition, and what are your motivations, intentions and desires?  Tell the absolute truth, don’t elaborate, stop if a child or servant comes in, and be brief.”

Peter does, and his answers satisfy Isaac.  Peter admits to being tempted by the money and power of the Penns, but, ultimately, he wants only Beverly, and when she’s gone, he promises not to take a penny of Isaac’s money.  He asks for only one thing from Isaac Penn: help in finding a sick (consumptive) child that he’d seen after he met the spielers, twenty years ago on his first night in Manhattan.  That leads to a conversation about fairness, and more importantly, justice.  Isaac Penn has very strong feelings on the subject:

Justice is higher but not as easy to understand – until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor.  The design of which I speak is far above our understanding.  But we can sometimes feel its presence.

No choreographer, no architect, engineer or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly.  Every action and every scene has its purpose.

Peter isn’t convinced, and continues to talk about the unfairness, not only of that long-ago child, but of Beverly, who will die young.  Isaac has an answer for this:

“Have you not yet realizes that Beverly has seen the golden age – not one that was, nor one that will be, but one that is here?  Though I am an old man, I have not yet seen it.  and she has.  That is what has broken my heart.”

Age, clearly, grants some measure of the vision that her fever has given Beverly, or that Pearly (and Athansor, for that matter) have been graced with.

Christ mas day comes and goes, and Peter and Beverly take the rest of the Penn children as well as some neighbor children (among them the Gamelys, a name to keep in your mind when we get to part 2 of the book)..  It’s a beautiful moment, and the way that Athansor runs as he carries their sleigh is beautiful – and awesome – as well.

Athansor, the white horse, moved in time with the diffuse static from above.  Though he had the power and joy of a fast horse heading for his stable, they could sense that the hypnotic rhythm in which he moved was that of an unimaginably long journey.  He was running in a way that they had never seen.  His strides became lighter and lighter, harder and harder, and more and more perfect.  He seemed to be readying himself to shed the world.

Keep that image in mind as the book goes on; it’s important.  We already know that Athansor – like so many of the other characters in the book – is trying to return to another, better world.  We’re seeing here that he may have begun to figure out that can actually be accomplished.

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When we last left our story, Peter and Beverly had just met, and fallen instantly in love (or, as I think happened, discovered a love that they’d had all along).  We open this new chapter with a brief discussion of the now-frozen Hudson River, and we join Peter, who’s riding the white horse on that river to the Bayonne Marsh.

The horse has no fear of falling through the ice, and Peter uses the ever-present (and roaring) Cloud Wall to keep himself oriented until he reaches the Marsh, where he’s met by the Baymen (who pop up silently, armed with spears, to greet him.

The Bayman who originally found Peter, Humpstone John, has some words for Peter, about the horse.  He explains that the horse’s name is Athansor, and that Athansor is the subject of one of the traditional songs of the Baymen, ten songs that are taught, one per decade, to each Bayman.  The first song, taught at age thirteen:

has to do with the just shape of the world.  It is nature’s song, and is about water, air, fire and things like that..

The second song, John explains, is the song of women.  The third one, is the song of Athansor.  It’s no surprise that all the Baymen are amazed at the horse’s presence, although they refuse to tell Peter anything.  He’s left to ponder matters, and he’s not sure he believes in the sort of transcendent justice that the Baymen seem to be expecting:

He doubted that he would have a hint of any greater purpose, and did not ever expect to see the one instant of unambiguous justice that legend said would make the cloud wall gold.

He continues to lose himself in thought and memory, eventually coming back to Beverly.  He recalls what happened after their initial meeting (he can remember everything except the color of Beverly’s eyes), and he carries on a conversation with his image of Mootfowl:

How could he explain this to Mootfowl, who was always present, in the air, as if Peter Lake lived in a painting and Mootfowl were a figure in a painting within the painting.

I think this is probably a lot more literal than figurative; I think that in a very real sense, Mootfowl is present for Peter, and he’s a very generous judge:

Mootfowl seemed amused, which surprised Peter Lake, who had thought he was guilty of a great transgression.  But the laughter and color in the bright window at the periphery of his vision suggested that this was not so.

It’s definitely not so, and we’ll see that play out especially int he next chapter.  Perhaps a sign of that is the way he finally, and overwhelmingly, remembers the color of her eyes:

And then he was suddenly overwhelmed.  It was as if a thousand bolts of lightning had converged to lift him.  All he could see was blue, electric blue, wet shining warm blue, blue with no end, everywhere, blue that glowed and made him cry out blue, blue, her eyes were blue.

I note especially the “wet, shining blue’ because that’s almost precisely the way Helprin describes the color of Peter Lake’s father’s eyes.  I doubt very much if that’s a coincidence.

Now that we know Peter’s state of mind, we’re all set for him to meet Beverly’s family, when we move on to the next chapter…

 

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We’re about to get to the first meeting between Peter Lake and Beverly Penn.  So let’s dive right in…

We open with Beverly seeing off the rest of her family, who are headed to their country house at the Lake of the Coheeries.  They’re going on ahead to open the house and to prepare the special sleeping arrangements Beverly will need, so she’s got a couple of nights on her own.  She’s

convinced that something special was about to happen – that she would, perhaps, get well, or run a great and sudden fever that would finally kill her.

That something, of course, will be Peter Lake.  We turn back to him, as he prepares to carry out his plan: stealing enough money to be able to set himself up somewhere else, somewhere safer.  Before that, though, he visits a cathedral – the Maritime Cathedral, endowed by Isaac Penn, as it turns out.  He then turns his attention back to burglary, and finds himself across the street from the Penn house.  He and the white horse watch as the Penns depart, and after them, Jayga, the last remaining servant.  He plans to return to the house in the early hours of the morning, do the job, and get out.

He happens to miss the flash of light as the door to the roof opens, so he doesn’t know that there’s still someone in the house; he just goes on his way, to an oyster house, to have a big meal in preparation for the task to come.  Helprin lovingly describes the place (he lovingly describes nearly everything in this book!), and then Peter gets down to business: four dozen oysters and a quart of hard cider.  And, a conversation with a barrister who’s gorging himself similarly.  Their conversation is brief, but it’s one of my favorite passages in the book.  Peter opens by telling his companion:

“I like to relax myself before a burglary.”

The barrister agrees, and he’s got a theory why this is a good thing:

“Wildness of that kind clears my mind and makes of it a tabula rasa, so to speak, able indeed to accept the imprint of pytacorian energy.”

(what exactly is pytacorian energy?  No idea, and the internet isn’t much help.  This link is the best answer I could find)

Peter Lake isn’t sure what it means, either.  But he likes it all the same:

“You must be a good lawyer, talking like that.  Mootfowl said that a lawyer’s job was to hypnotize people with intricate words, and then walk off with their property.”

A lawyer is no different than a burglar, in Peter Lake’s mind.  Not that he’d consider that an insult!

After a bath and a rest, Peter’s ready to go to work.  At four o’clock in the morning, he makes his way back to the Penn house, and now we get a back-and-forth, with Peter’s and Beverly’s actions alternating from paragraph to paragraph.  This is a fantastic sequence, wonderfully handled.  Beverly descends through the house to the bath, while Peter seeks a way in.  He notes that:

all the nonacrobatic entry points were heavily barred.

I love “nonacrobatic.”  It’s such an appropriate word for a burglar.  And its also not an impediment.  The alarms on the bars of the windows, however, are a bit more challenging.  As are the further alarms installed on all the windows.  And the ridiculously thick roof that he finds himself unable to cut through:

Isaac Penn was afraid of meteorites, and because of that the attic of his house was, more or less, a solid block of wood.

Beverly dives into the bath (ten feet long, eight wide; more swimming pool than bath, really), and Peter discovers the door from her rooftop perch into the house. He’s not sure if it’s a trap but decides to risk it anyway.  He enters the house and makes his way to Isaac Penn’s study.  He ignores a Gutenberg Bible in a glass case, because, after all:

it could not have been very old, having come from Guttenberg, a town in New Jersey.

But he does focus on the safe in the wall, which, it turns out, isn’t a safe at all but a giant plug of steel set into the wall for the sole purpose of keeping burglars occupied.  It does so while Beverly emerges from the bath.  She had been feeling free of her fever, but now, after chancing a swim, she’s not sure if it’s returned.  She had hesitated before going into the bath, but plunged ahead anyway, following Isaac Penn’s advice:

He had told her always to have courage, and sometimes to step into the breach – though he need not have told her, for it seemed to have been her temperament from the very start.

This echoes Peter Lake’s personality, and also a character we’ll meet in part 2 of the book.  For now, she continues to forge ahead.  As she tells herself:

Fight the fever.  Fight it, and, if necessary, go down fighting.  The courage would not go unrewarded, would it?  That is to be seen, she thought.

I think we already know the answer to that question.

As Beverly makes her way to the kitchen, and thence to the piano, Peter continues his fight with the safe; each of them misses multiple opportunities to see the other as Beverly passes by the study.  Finally, Peter gives up, and Beverly starts to play.  The music immediately draws him, and he likens it to the lights of the great bridges.  He watches, silently, as Beverly wrestles with the piano, falling in love with her more deeply by the second:

He had unspeakable admiration for the way she had risen from obvious weakness to court with such passion the elusive and demanding notes that he had heard.  She had done what Mootfowl had always argued.  She had risen above herself, right before his eyes.She had risen, and then fallen back, weakened, vulnerable, alone.  He wanted to follow her in this.

He wants to approach her but cannot imagine how, and then opts to simply withdraw, but he is betrayed.  A loose floorboard squeaks under hi weight, announcing his presence (this is one of the very few scenes that the film version uses more-or-less intact from the book).

Beverly takes in the sight, seemingly takes in everything about Peter in just a few moments.  She laughs, and then cries, and then looks at him and says:

“If you’re what I’ve got, then you’re what I’ll take.”

Peter is not offended; to the contrary, he agrees with her evaluation of him:

For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.

He’s frozen in place, unable to approach her, or to leave.  Until she turns to him and stretches out her arms:

And he went to her as if he had been born for it.

Arguably, that’s exactly what he was born for, and she as well.  I don’t think that they fell in love in those brief moments in the conservatory after Peter stepped on the floorboard; they were, are and always will be in love; this is just the moment when they realize it (this is connected with the nature of both justice and time itself, as we’ll see later on in the book).

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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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Onwards to chapter 2!  This is another fairly short chapter (there are some beastly long ones later in the book; be warned!), in which we learn a little bit more about Peter Lake.  Primarily, we get a good view of his current situation, and a decent look at his personality.  We don’t get much of his backstory, but that will come soon enough.

We open where we left off, with Peter atop the white horse, opening up some distance between him and the Short Tails:

Leaving the Short tails behind would be easy, because not one of them (including Pearly, raised in the Five Points just like the rest) knew how to ride.  They were masters of the waterfront and could do anything with a small boat, but on land they walked, took the trolley, and jumped the gates of the subway or the El.

This is a big deal for Peter, because he’s been Public Enemy #1 to Pearly and the Short Tails for three years.  This is partly Peter’s own fault, because he’s incapable of leaving their domain of Manhattan for any length of time:

It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity.

Peter also can’t help but flirt with danger, even when it’s not necessary, as we’ll see shortly.  But for the moment, at least, he feels not merely safe but invulnerable on the horse.

But now, with a horse, it would be different.  Why hadn’t he thought of a horse before?  He could stretch his margin of safety almost immeasurably, and put not yards but miles between himself and Pearly Soames.

Exhilarated by this seemingly magical horse, Peter can’t help but show off and gallops down the thoroughfares of Manhattan, attracting police attention.  He eventually ends up stuck behind a traffic jam, and the horse leads him into a theater, where Peter (and the horse) end up sharing the stage with Caradelba, the Spanish Gypsy.  Ever gallant, Peter apologizes for disturbing her act by presenting her with a hat he grabbed off a policeman’s head.

Upon leaving the theater (which, although it’s not named, is called the Coheeries Theater, which comes up again in part 2 of the book), Peter comes up with a plan.  He would temporarily leave Manhattan, allowing the police and the Short Tails to fight it out:

Were both organizations to come up face to face in search of their vanished prey, the shock of collision might provide Peter Lake with three or four months of freedom.

Peter decides to remove himself to the Bayonne March, home of the Baymen, aboriginal clamdiggers, and the people who

had found Peter Lake and raised him (for a time) much int he style of benevolent wolves.

Therein hangs a tale, and we will get it in another chapter or two.  For now, it’s enough to note what Helprin tells us about the Marsh and the Baymen.

not only were they extraordinary fighters and impossible to find, but their realm was only hafl-real, and anyone entering it without their approval was likely to vanish forever into the roaring clouds which swept over the mirrorlike waters.

The Bayonne Marsh isn’t the only half-real place in this book; we’ll visit another such community later in part 1 when we travel to the Lake of the Coheeries.  For now, just take note that Peter was raised in such a place.  But before he can get there, his attention is captured by a burning ferry , which, apparently, is quite the tourist attraction in turn of the century Manhattan.

There were also vendors, anticipating the thousands who would arrive only after the ferry was a sulking trap of drifting charcoal, and then feed their curiosity on chestnuts, roasted corn, hot pretzels, and meat-on-the-spit.

Peter stays to watch, going so far as to ignore the presence of a Short Tail informant.  Instead, he watches, transfixed by the efforts of the firemen trying to board the ferry.  Why are they trying, when all the passengers are either dead, or already rescued?  Peter knows – and it’s something that drives him , too:

They took power from the fire.  The closer they fought it, the stronger they became.  The firemen knew that though it sometimes killed them, the fire gave them priceless gifts.

Just as the Short Tails do for Peter, even as they try their best to capture and kill him.  And, sure enough, they make their appearance in a pair of automobiles.  Again, however, the horse is far too swift for them, and he carries Peter away with

strides so powerful that he almost flew.

What have we learned so far?  Peter was raised by the Baymen, but can’t bear to leave Manhattan for any length of time.  He draws strength from the efforts of the Short Tails to kill him, even as he looks (but not too hard) for a way to get them off his trail permanently.

But why do they hate him so?  And how did Peter come to be raised by a group of clamdiggers in a half-real world across the river from Manhattan?  We’re about to find out…

 

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Onwards to the first chapter of “Winter’s Tale” – but, first, a brief comment about the movie adaptation that came out earlier this year.  If you’re coming to the book after having seen it, please forget about everything you saw.  There is very little in common between book and film.

There is a movie that’s a lot closer in spirit to the book, a 1948 film called “Portrait of Jennie”.  I’d highly recommend it for its own sake, but I think it’s a wonderful match to “Winter’s Tale.”  Honestly, I would be shocked if Mark Helprin had not seen it, because there are a lot of elements in the film – both larger thematic and philosophical points, and specific images and dialogue – that show up in the book.  Starting with a slow journey through the clouds, accompanied by a voiceover which informs us that:

Since time began man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity and asked the eternal question: What is time? What is life? What is space? What is death? Through a hundred civilizations, philosophers and scientists have come together with answers, but the bewilderment remains… Science tells us that nothing ever dies but only changes, that time itself does not pass but curves around us, and that the past and the future are together at our side for ever. Out of the shadows of knowledge, and out of a painting that hung on a museum wall, comes our story, the truth of which lies not on our screen but in your hearts.

Keep those words in mind as you read the book, and see if you don’t agree that they apply here, too.  And with that, here we go…

We open with Part 1 of the novel, titled “The City” and chapter one, “A White Horse Escapes.”  And we open directly with the horse, who is nameless for now (that will change in a couple of chapters).  He has escaped from his master’s stable, and he’s roaming the streets of Manhattan, having crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn.  Bridges are a matter of great importance, and in Helprin’s world, even the horse knows why:

And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.

This may sound like nothing more than flowery language, but it’s not.  Helprin means every word literally, especially the part about spanning dreams and time.  Remember this passage as the story progresses.

The horse continues on, and we get some very nice imagery, setting us firmly in 1910’s New York.  As he trots along the just-awakening streets, the horse catches sight of the incredible colors of New York Harbor:

At the end of this polar rainbow, on the horizon, was a mass of white – the foil into which the entire city had been set – that was beginning to turn gold with the rising sun.

Remember how Helprin talked about color in the prologue?  We see it again here, and particularly take note of gold.  The golden light enraptures the horse, and he determines to get to it.  But his way is blocked by a heavy iron gate.  And no matter which way he goes, he finds his way similarly blocked.  He cannot get to the golden light, to the other world that is so close at hand and yet impossibly far away.  Again, remember this for later; it will come up again.

The horse finds one final gate, also locked, and as his hope of reaching that other world fades, he becomes aware of something else, and we’re about to meet our first human character.  The horse spies a lone man running through the snow, pursued by a dozen armed men who are trying to kill him.  The man makes it to the gate shortly ahead of his would-be assassins, jams the lock and then proceeds to slip and fall, right in front of the horse.

Had it not been for the horse peering at him from behind the woodshed, the downed man might have stayed down.  His name was Peter Lake, and he said to himself out loud, “You’re in bad shape when a horse takes pity on you, you stupid bastard.”

The horse does take pity on him, and bends down to allow Peter to mount him.  Once atop the horse, Peter laughs and rides off, leaving his pursuers – now named as the Short Tail Gang, firing their pistols futilely at him and cursing as he leaves them behind; and that’s where the chapter ends.

Peter Lake is one of our main characters, and we don’t learn much about him here, other than that a gang called the Short Tails wants to kill him; and that he establishes a strong and instant bond with the horse.  But we do have two of the major themes of the book – or, really, two aspects of the same theme – laid out very clearly.

The desire – need – to return to another, better world (perhaps to gain readmittance to Heaven?), is on full display here.  We see it in the discussion of bridges and their ability to connect not only two geographic points, but two different worlds (dreams and reality, if those even are two different things, which is debatable in Helptin’s world), and different times as well.

And we see it in the way the horse cannot find his way past the iron gates to get to the golden light.  Every street is blocked; there is no route he can travel to get where he wants – needs – to go.  Or, at least, there is no physical, corporeal, tangible route.  No route that can be seen with mundane eyes.  But that isn’t cause for despair, because there may be other routes, which can be seen if only you look at things the right way.  Helprin will return to this again and again over the course of the novel, in a variety of ways, as we’ll see.

That’s my take on this short opening chapter; please feel free to share your thoughts!

 

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I’ve mentioned before that Mark Helprin’s “Winter’s Tale” is my favorite novel of all time (and also the best novel I’ve ever read).  Every year, once the weather starts getting cold and the days shorter, I reread it, and it’s about that time.

This year, I want to share my love/obsession with the world (or at least the regular visitors of this blog).  I’m going to read two chapters a week, and post my thoughts and feelings about them.  And I’m encouraging any and all of my visitors to join me, both in reading the book, and in discussing it.

I’ll kick things off right here, talking about the very brief prologue.  Even before that, Helprin starts us off with a quote that sets the tone for all that’s to follow:

“I have been to another world, and come back.  Listen to me.”

That sentiment could apply to many of the characters in the story about to unfold, and it prepares us to jump across both worlds and eras (and different times ARE other worlds; as the famous quote has it, “the past is another country.”).

The prologue showcases Helprin’s gift of prose; it’s gorgeous from the very first word.  As he opens things:

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan.

He goes on to talk about New York City specifically, where our story is set, and, really, the book is one long love letter to the greatest city in the world.  We’re told about the mass of white clouds that surround the city, about which we’ll learn much more as the novel progresses.  We  also get our first reference to the the city as one great machine, about which, again, much more later.

And then we are told:

…our swift unobserved descent will bring us to life that is blooming in the quiet of another time.

This is important, as we’ll see very shortly in chapter one.  The prologue ends with an invitation:

As we float down in utter silence, into a frame again unfreezing we are confronted by a tableau of winter colors.  These are very strong, and they call us in.

Colors, both wintry and otherwise, play a large role not only symbolically, but very literally in the story, as we’ll discover early on.

So the stage is set.  We’re about to embark on a journey that will span worlds and centuries.  I hope you’ll come along with me; our first steps will be onto the snow-covered streets of pre-World War I Manhattan, which is where chapter one begins…

 

Chapter Index

I’ll keep an updated list of links to the individual chapter discussions here, so it’ll all be easy to find…

Part 1, Chapter 1 (“A White Horse Escapes”)

Part 1, Chapter 2 (“The Ferry Burns in Morning Cold”)

Part 1, Chapter 3 (“Pearly Soames”)

Part 1, Chapter 4 (“Peter Lake Hangs From A Star”)

Part 1, Chapter 5 (“Beverly”)

Part 1, Chapter 6 (“A Goddess in the Bath”)

Part 1, Chapter 7 (“On the Marsh”)

Part 1, Chapter 8 (“Lake of the Coheeries”)

Part 1, Chapter 9 (“The Hospital in Printing House Square”)

Part 1, Chapter 10 (“Aceldama”)

Part 2, Chapter 1 (“Four Gates to the City”)

Part 2, Chapter 2 (“Lake of the Coheeries”)

Part 2, Chapter 3 (“In the Drifts”)

Part 2, Chapter 4 (“A New Life”)

Part 2, Chapter 5 (“Hell Gate”)

Part 3, Chapter 1 (“Nothing is Random”)

Part 3, Chapter 2 (“Peter Lake Returns”)

 Part 3, Chapter 3 (“The Sun…”)

Part 3, Chapter 4 (“…and The Ghost”)

Part 3, Chapter 5 (“An Early Summer Dinner at Petipas”)

Part 3, Chapter 6 (“The Machine Age”)

Part 4, Chapter 1 (“A Very Short History of the Clouds”)

Part 4, Chapter 2 (“Battery Bridge”)

Part 4, Chapter 3 (“White Horse and Dark Horse”)

Part 4, Chapter 4 (“The White Dog of Afghanistan”)

Part 4, Chapter 5 (“Abysmillard Redux”)

Part 4, Chapter 6 (“Ex Machina”)

Part 4, Chapter 7 (“For the Soldiers and Sailors of Chelsea”)

Part 4, Chapter 8 (“The City Alight”)

Part 4, Chapter 9 (“A Golden Age”)

Epilogue

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Following up on my post a couple of weeks ago about the “Winter’s Tale” movie, and the many things wrong with it, I promised to go into detail as to how I would have done it differently.  As with the previous post, there are spoilers aplenty here (and very little in the way of comprehension if you’re not familiar with the book).

The first thing I have to admit is, I’m going to take liberties with the book, just as the actual film did – but hopefully to better effect. So let’s begin.  First, though, let’s recap our main cast:

Peter Lake – Tom Hiddleston (he was up for the part in the first place, and a much better choice than Colin Farrell)

Beverly Penn – Jessica Brown-Findlay (just as in the actual film)

Pearly Soames – Russell Crowe (again, as in the actual film)

Cecil Woolley/Mr. Cecil Mature – Jonah Hill (it’s kind of a comic role, and Hill fits it physically, too)

Isaac Penn – Anthony Hopkins

The Very Reverend Mootfowl – William Hurt (since I fired him from the role of Isaac Penn that he had in the actual film, it’s only fair – and he’d work better in this role anyway)

Jackson Mead – James Cromwell (he’s got the gravitas to play the role, plus he’s 6’6″, which is helpful considering the description of Mead in the book)

Virginia Gamely – Jennifer Connolly (as in the actual film)

Hardesty Marratta – Bradley Cooper (he’s the Big New Thing in Hollywood, and he can actually act, so why not?)

Sarah Gamely – Kim Novak (she hasn’t acted on screen in 20+ years, but this is fantasy anyway, so let’s go with it.  Besides, she’s only going to be on-screen for two minutes)

Willa Penn – Eva Marie Saint (no reason to recast her from the actual film)

 

We open the film following a ragged man, who we’ll learn a little later is Peter Lake, into a movie theater, in the year 1916 (we’ll have an on-screen title to let the audience know the date).  We get a view of WWI-era New York City as he does so, and then, once he’s inside and seated, the theater’s screen fills up our screen, too, and we see what Peter’s seeing (this comes from the chapter titled “Aceldama”, at the very end of Part One of the novel).  On the movie screen is an almost unbelievable portrait, entitled “The City in the Third Millennium”  It’s a magical view of a futuristic city with buildings stretching above the clouds, tiny lighted vehicles flying to and fro, etc.  It’s clearly New York, and yet it’s also clearly not precisely the New York we know. That image fades, replaced by another image, this one almost apocalyptic, entitled “As the City of the Future Burns”, and that then fades out, into the credits. Over this scene, we have a Voiceover (Eva Marie Saint, although the audience doesn’t yet know who she is) narrating about the Cloud Wall, and the way that it is a physical representation of the invisible connections between past, present and future…

(Why open with this? The movie scene seems like it could be easily dropped, but I think it’s a good way to set up the themes of connections across time, and also to firmly emphasize that this story takes place in a fantastical version of New York. And we’ll revisit The City in the Third Millennium a little later)

We cut to the credits, which play over a short montage of a ship (the City of Justice) coming into New York Harbor.  We see it dock, and a procession of poorly-dressed, half-starved passengers emerge onto an island – heading to be processed for immigration.  We focus in on a young couple with a baby.  In quick, dialogue-less shots, we follow them in, and then back out again to the ship (a title tells us that this is happening in 1880).  Back aboard ship, the couple despairs, until the father kicks in a door and sees a miniature model of the ship.  He takes the model, and turns it into a tiny vessel in which to place their son.  The couple lower their child into the water, in hopes he will find a place in the new world that they cannot enter (we’ll take the dialogue straight from the book as they say goodbye to their son, the baby who will become Peter Lake). This will take up maybe 5 minutes.

(this is a little out of order from the book, but the book itself jumps around with flashbacks and digressions, so I’m not too worried about it)

Now we have another montage – Peter drifts into the Bayonne Marsh, where he’s found by the native Baymen and raised as one of them for his first twelve years (definitely including the brief scene where Peter first learns to use a sword), and culminating in the Baymen sending him away, to Manhattan.  There are more very quick scenes showing his arrival, meeting the spielers and eventually being picked up by the police and brought to Reverend Overweary’s home.

(the book handles this fairly quickly, too.  The one thing I’m dropping is Anarinda – and the sexual content of the scenes with the spielers.  I don’t think we really need it, and considering how old Peter is in these scenes, it would get us an NC-17 rating, so out it goes)

We slow down a bit here, to showcase Peter learning to become a mechanic, and meeting Cecil Woolley and working under the Very Reverend Mootfowl. The montage ends with the failed “audition” with Jackson Mead, followed immediately by Mootfowl’s apparent suicide. This, plus the previous montage, takes up 10-15 minutes or so.

(I think we absolutely need Peter’s training as a mechanic.  And if we’re going to include Jackson Mead later, we need to set him up, as well as Mootfowl.  And it gives us a bit of humor, with Cecil’s disastrous efforts to try and carry out Jackson Mead’s instructions in the audition)

Now Peter and Cecil meet up with Pearly Soames. We keep the scene where they meet and are recruited verbatim from the book, and then another montage as Peter becomes a Short Tail and learns the various arts of burglary and petty crime. It’s not a long sequence, and it leads into the Short Tails meeting in the Cemetery of the Honored Dead, Pearly’s plan to steal a ship full of gold and build his golden room, and Peter’s betrayal of his boss. This is such a fantastic scene, we have to keep it in. We cut straight from the meeting, to the fight on the Bayonne Marsh where Pearly realizes Peter has double-crossed him to protect the Baymen. This takes 20-25 minutes.

(this was a huge failing of the actual film – the Cemetery of the Honored Dead is so cinematic, I can’t believe they didn’t include it.  And it establishes Pearly as very clearly insane, which I think is an important point to bring out.  Yes, he’s a villain, but he’s also got quite a lot going on that’s worth watching)

And now, after 40-50 minutes, we’re back at chapter one, with the Short Tails chasing Peter, and him being rescued by Athansor, the white horse. We quickly move to Peter’s plan to pull off one big robbery and then use the horse to run to ground away from Manhattan, where the urbanified Short Tails generally don’t venture from.

(if at all possible, we keep the Oyster Bar scene, because I love the dialogue between Peter and the lawyer).

This big score, of course, will be the Penn mansion, and we follow the book exactly as Peter meets Beverly Penn. Their courtship follows the book, and they journey to the Penn house upstate in Lake of the Coheeries. We’ll edit a bit there for pacing, but keep the first meeting between Peter and Isaac Penn. Then it’s back to Manhattan. We’ll have the scene at the Penn mansion where Beverly distracts the attention of the Chief of Police from Peter by showing him the new painting in the basement. This, of course, is The City in the Third Millennium from the opening, this time in glorious color. Then we have Peter and Beverly’s argument over whether she’s well enough to go out dancing on New Year’s Eve. Of course, they go, and Beverly’s dancing (just as in the book) transfixes Pearly Soames, who’s there to kill Peter. Beverly dies shortly thereafter, and we go straight from the funeral to a heartbroken and defeated Peter wandering the streets of Manhattan, and finally walking out of the movie theater from the opening scene.  The very next scene is Peter’s confrontation with Pearly on the Brooklyn Bridge, where he and Athansor jump off and vanish into the white Cloud Wall. This all takes 30-40 minutes.

(for the most part, we keep things as they happen in the book.  What do we lose?  Peter’s trip back to the Bayonne Marsh; Jayga the servant and her story to the police; the introduction to Beverly and the Penns, and the optometrist, and some of what happens at Lake of the Coheeries.  Losing that first scene with the Penns is a hard choice, but I kind of like the idea of the audience first meeting Beverly at the same time that Peter does.  And we can move the dialogue about her disease into the boat/sleigh journey up to Lake of the Coheeries.  We also have to lose Peter’s visit to the hospital, and shorten or cut out most of his post-Beverly scenes).

So that’s the first half of the film. We’re somewhere between 70 and 90 minutes, and not quite halfway done.  This is where we have our intermission, and when we return, we’re in the final years of the 20th century.

We open the second half of the film in Lake of the Coheeries, with Virginia Gamely and her mother Sarah.  We see Virginia dream, and in the dream she’s in Manhattan, in the Penn mansion, and a man and a woman are leading her down stairs into the basement to view a painting (the City in the Third Millennium, of course).  Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Hardesty Marratta is also dreaming, and in his dream, the same woman Virginia dreamed about is leading Hardesty and Virginia down the stairs to see the painting, as well.  This is maybe 5-10 minutes.

(this is a change/addition to the book.  I think, sadly, we need to lose Hardesty’s journey across the country and visit to Lake of the Coheeries.  But we sill need his connection to Virginia, and this seems like an efficient way to handle that.  I hate losing Jesse Honey, and the poker game on the train, but we only have so much time to tell the story.  We’re also dropping Praeger de Pinto and giving some of his role to Hardesty).

Back in Lake of the Coheeries, Virginia wakes up, remembers her dream, and knows she needs to go to Manhattan.  She and her baby Martin set off, and we follow her in a montage as she travels on skates and by boat, until she gets to Grand Central Station.  There she meets the woman from her dream, Jessica Penn, and Jessica invites Virginia to join her at dinner with the staff of The Sun.  There she meets Hardesty, who’s the editor in chief, and all the other editors.  We’ll keep this scene as close to the book as possible, but we’ll include Asbury Gunwillow and Christiana in the scene, too

(I don’t want to lose Asbury and Christiana entirely, but we don’t have the time to tell their full story)

From dinner, we follow Virginia, Hardesty and Jessica back to the Penn mansion, where Virginia will stay for the night.  Also at the mansion is the owner of The Sun, Willa Penn, who suggests that Jessica show Virginia and Hardesty the painting in the basement.  That happens exactly as in both Virginia and Hardesty’s dreams.  This, combined with the previous scene, takes 10 minutes or so.

(as noted above, I have no problem with using Willa to replace Harry Penn in the story.  It doesn’t hurt anything and lets us use Eva Marie Saint, so why not?)

We get a montage of Virginia and Hardesty’s romance, 5 minutes or so, including their marriage, the birth of Abby and ending with the 150th anniversary celebration of The Sun, with the reappearance of the Cloud Wall.

Next we jump to later that night, and Peter Lake plummeting from the sky into New York Harbor to be retrieved by a ferry and its crew.  We follow Peter back to shore and then to the hospital, and we keep those scenes as they are in the book, with one addition.  After the red-haired doctor knocks him out, he dreams, first a celestial vision of Beverly, and then a more realistic vision, of a white horse crashing into the sea just as he did, and a young girl – a young Christiana – running into the water to the horse).  Then Peter wakes up, realizes he’s not in 1916 anymore, and sees the modern city for the first time.  This is probably 10 minutes.

(again, I’m using dreams to link characters together.  It’s kind of a cliche, but I don’t see any other way to do it quickly)

At this point, we’re somewhere between 100 and 125 minutes.  With a goal of 185 minutes for our running time, that gives us 60-85 minutes to tell the rest of the story.  Onwards!

We have a few quick shots of Peter’s life after he gets out of the hospital, living on the streets, becoming a derelict.  Then we join the staff of the Sun (including Hardesty, Virginia and Willa Penn) at Petipas, where they’re having a monthly dinner.  They’re interrupted by an encounter with Peter Lake, who’s barely recognizable at this point (exactly as in the book), and then, after he departs, they’re all stunned by the arrival of Jackson Mead’s great ship.  We see him on the bridge, along with Cecil and the Reverend Mootfowl.

 

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