Read Online Ellis Island & Other Stories by Mark Helprin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Helprin
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charge across the ice-packed North River, setting out in a puff of white crystal breath, rolling across the cold blue water.
The hotel at Amagansett was a large, airy white frame house standing in the deep green of potato fields that ran to a bluff overlooking an Arabian stretch of dunes and the blinding sea. Martin and Lydia walked to the water each day to swim and jump down the cool sides of the dunes. The sea was achingly cold, so their parents often ignored the beach in favor of sitting on the porch. In the green and the silence, they seemed to be happy just rocking back and forth in beads of cascading sun, their faces relaxed and content.
For the first time, Martin discovered that he carried a store of strong memories which emerged bright and clear in his eyes and gave him access to a world of random and sudden images as beautiful as the upwelling of music. He was chasing a horse in the pasture behind the hotel. The hotelkeeper, a portly Dane named Friebourg, had told Martin that if he could saddle the colt in the back field he could ride him. “Before you saddle him,” the Dane had said with amusement, “you’ll have to catch him, and that, little boy, could take a long time. I will sit here and watch, for this will be better than the vaudeville.” Martin had not liked the Dane’s patronizing attitude, and was determined to catch the colt.
The colt looked at him with the confidence and superiority of a dentist, knowing that after a little bit of fun the creature on tiny legs who had come to capture him would soon be incoherent and exhausted. It was just that way. Martin coaxed him with sweet language, fake smiles, hoarse rhetoric, careful commands, invigorated threats, and pleas for mercy. Nibbling the grass until Martin stealthily approached, breathing hot and heavy, lasso in hand, the colt then flew to another extreme of the field. Martin ran himself silly. Had the colt thrust his neck into the noose, Martin would not have had the strength to hold on, after two hours of the chase. Meanwhile, beyond the clover, the porch had filled with his family and the Friebourgs—the Dane himself, whose laughter could be heard from the pasture; Mrs. Friebourg, a silent hardworking woman; their daughter, Christiana, a girl just a year or two older than Lydia; and an ever-present, cut-glass gallon pitcher of beer.
In exhaustion and embarrassment Martin discovered that his defeat gave rise to splendid pictures—that the mahogany color of the horse billowed into a world of dark-wood city interiors and the dappled shapes of figures within. An exhalation of breath and a dizzy glance at a lone white cloud, riding far off, locked into a tableau of winter in Manhattan—the breath of horses in snow, dark-blue water off the Battery, a shadow across a cold field in which stood a charcoal-limned tree. These frames appeared and he felt the city behind him in a cloud of heat, as if it were a living body like his own. Even though Mr. Friebourg laughed, Martin continued to chase the horse, comforting himself by enjoying the color in a world he saw rapidly blooming and dying as if it were running the gates of a rigid metal machine, remembering all the while the sadness he felt in the frozen images of a motion picture when it ran improperly and crippled. That night he went to bed early and sore. Mrs. Bayer put mayapple vinegar on his legs for the sunburn, and he fell asleep listening to the breeze in contest with a lissome Norway pine.
The next morning, Martin was outside the hotel at five-thirty, furiously building what he called a “wind indicator,” which was a tangle of sticks, flags, strings, and tin cans, designed to sound a different tone for each of the four prime directions of wind. After several hours, it actually worked, though there was no telling what would have happened had the steady south wind changed its course.
Finally, Christiana Friebourg passed by (he had built it mainly for her benefit, imagining that she was
The hotel at Amagansett was a large, airy white frame house standing in the deep green of potato fields that ran to a bluff overlooking an Arabian stretch of dunes and the blinding sea. Martin and Lydia walked to the water each day to swim and jump down the cool sides of the dunes. The sea was achingly cold, so their parents often ignored the beach in favor of sitting on the porch. In the green and the silence, they seemed to be happy just rocking back and forth in beads of cascading sun, their faces relaxed and content.
For the first time, Martin discovered that he carried a store of strong memories which emerged bright and clear in his eyes and gave him access to a world of random and sudden images as beautiful as the upwelling of music. He was chasing a horse in the pasture behind the hotel. The hotelkeeper, a portly Dane named Friebourg, had told Martin that if he could saddle the colt in the back field he could ride him. “Before you saddle him,” the Dane had said with amusement, “you’ll have to catch him, and that, little boy, could take a long time. I will sit here and watch, for this will be better than the vaudeville.” Martin had not liked the Dane’s patronizing attitude, and was determined to catch the colt.
The colt looked at him with the confidence and superiority of a dentist, knowing that after a little bit of fun the creature on tiny legs who had come to capture him would soon be incoherent and exhausted. It was just that way. Martin coaxed him with sweet language, fake smiles, hoarse rhetoric, careful commands, invigorated threats, and pleas for mercy. Nibbling the grass until Martin stealthily approached, breathing hot and heavy, lasso in hand, the colt then flew to another extreme of the field. Martin ran himself silly. Had the colt thrust his neck into the noose, Martin would not have had the strength to hold on, after two hours of the chase. Meanwhile, beyond the clover, the porch had filled with his family and the Friebourgs—the Dane himself, whose laughter could be heard from the pasture; Mrs. Friebourg, a silent hardworking woman; their daughter, Christiana, a girl just a year or two older than Lydia; and an ever-present, cut-glass gallon pitcher of beer.
In exhaustion and embarrassment Martin discovered that his defeat gave rise to splendid pictures—that the mahogany color of the horse billowed into a world of dark-wood city interiors and the dappled shapes of figures within. An exhalation of breath and a dizzy glance at a lone white cloud, riding far off, locked into a tableau of winter in Manhattan—the breath of horses in snow, dark-blue water off the Battery, a shadow across a cold field in which stood a charcoal-limned tree. These frames appeared and he felt the city behind him in a cloud of heat, as if it were a living body like his own. Even though Mr. Friebourg laughed, Martin continued to chase the horse, comforting himself by enjoying the color in a world he saw rapidly blooming and dying as if it were running the gates of a rigid metal machine, remembering all the while the sadness he felt in the frozen images of a motion picture when it ran improperly and crippled. That night he went to bed early and sore. Mrs. Bayer put mayapple vinegar on his legs for the sunburn, and he fell asleep listening to the breeze in contest with a lissome Norway pine.
The next morning, Martin was outside the hotel at five-thirty, furiously building what he called a “wind indicator,” which was a tangle of sticks, flags, strings, and tin cans, designed to sound a different tone for each of the four prime directions of wind. After several hours, it actually worked, though there was no telling what would have happened had the steady south wind changed its course.
Finally, Christiana Friebourg passed by (he had built it mainly for her benefit, imagining that she was
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