Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780544320420
Amazon: 0544320425
Barnesnoble: 0544320425
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2014-01-07T06:00:00+00:00

LIKE A rusty, bashed-up harbor tug attached to a sleek new liner, Marcel towed Christiana from one party to another. He had her by his side, turning heads, at two dozen affairs a week. When they had left the yacht on the Fourth of July and taken a taxi through a mile and a half of canyon walls of blood-red brick and mirrored glass, they had seen three or four people where normally there would have been thousands. Because no windows were open and the air was so still and hot that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead. Had she driven in from Long Island, past the prairie full of tombs, the impression might have been strengthened. At Marcel’s parties, it was confirmed.

They were the price for living in a small palace with a garden that overlooked the East River. Most of the time, Christiana had the carefully decorated reception rooms, the libraries, whirlpools, saunas, and sunny balconies to herself. Marcel was almost always at his office, but when he returned he expected her to be waiting for him, ready to go out, fully made-up, dressed in expensive silks or in gowns covered with flashing scales.

At first, she looked for work, and would have been happy to have become a salesgirl at Woolworth’s or a cleaning woman in a bank. At the parties, benefits, and testimonial dinners, she was offered jobs as if they were the things that servants carried around on trays. Though these jobs paid enormous salaries, they demanded that she make herself available in the same way everyone assumed she did for Marcel.

The young men who caught her eye turned out to be either Apand employees loyal to their chief, or voracious creatures not unlike him who always managed to ask her to call them in secret. And the men who put up the tents and hauled the food and dishes were different from the fishermen in Amagansett who did similar work in their spare time. They didn’t dare look at Christiana, and she was ashamed to look at them. It saddened her to remember when she had passed out food to the Scandinavian families that came to the hotel when she was a girl, while a player piano banged out Danish songs from fifty years before, and she and the sunburned little blond boys blushed almost to ignition at the thought of dancing or touching.

On August nights, Christiana, Marcel, and his guests would occasionally sit on a balcony that extended over the river at the garden’s edge. Laden barges and intracoastal craft rode the current close to shore, passing silently and swiftly like monsters trying to sneak down the channel after having wandered by accident into the city. These poor frightened things became targets for the Apand pistols. As the barges glided by, Marcel, Christiana, and their friends pumped shots into the darkness, trying to

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