Winter's Tale Part 22

The Sun was patterned after a whaling enterprise. After all expenses were paid out and everyone had his living, the profits were divided according to an elaborate system of shares. No one other than an employee of the paper was ent.i.tled to shares, and they were neither inheritable nor transferable. Each employee received five shares upon joining. Thereafter, for every advance he made he received another five, and one share for each year he had worked. There were twenty levels of advancement, and there was seniority. For example, after his first year, a kitchen helper would normally own six shares. After several years on the staff, Hardesty Marratta (who had come in on level eight) had worked his way to level twelve. Thus, with his five original shares, sixty for his work level, and five for the years had put in, he would have had seventy shares. But he actually had eighty, because he had won two merit awards of five shares apiece. Harry Penn had been with the paper (starting at age ten as a copy boy) for eighty-five years. He was, naturally, at level twenty. He ha five original shares, and, when he was younger and could win aware (for which the editor-in-chief and the publisher were not eligible), he had won ten of them. This left him with 240 shares, quite a lot more than his kitchen helper's six, but not that many more than Hardesty's eighty. Were the kitchen helper to stay (as indeedprobably would, for the wages and benefits alone) for ten years, advance two levels to kitchen supervisor, and win an award for his salad, his lentil soup, or, let us say, pulling a baby from the path of Craig Binky's speeding limousine, he would have a total of thirty shares.

This system tickled not only ambition, but productivity as well. Since the number of shares was not fixed, and since whatever profit accrued each year was finite (the notion of infinite profit haunted only Craig Binky, who hired economists and sorcerers to see if it was possible), it was to everyone's advantage to work harda"not only to produce a higher profit, but to hold down the number of jobs and, thus, the number of shares.

The Sun's employees wanted to serve it as best they could, not only because doing so was in their interests, but because The Sun was faira"and they could feel this in the same way that they could feel beauty in a landscape. How delightful, too, to know that not only could they feel it, but it could be demonstrated by several systems of logic, and by the way people looked when they came in, morning and evening.

And The Sun's remarkably equitable and effective social system originated not in the barrel of a gun, nor in any cruelty, nor in the French Communes, nor with revolutionary violence, nor in the imagination of a reader in the library of the British Museum, but in the nineteenth-century American whaling s.h.i.+p.

THAT The Sun was not a dull instrument was probably due in large part to its lively and unusual compet.i.tor.

Rupert Binky had once issued a famous challenge to Harry Penn. Boasting on his editorial page and to his friends at the Alabaster Club The Ghost would extinguish The Sun by the millennium, he claimed that, if it did not, he would attach weighted chains to his body and jump off New York's highest bridge."Will Harry Penn attach weighted chains to his body and do the same, if we have succeeded, as we will have by the millennium, in burying The Sun?" he asked in print.

No," Harry Penn had written back on his own editorial page.

"And I absolve Rupert Binky of the responsibility to carry out his vow, if only for the sake of the maritime traffic on our rivers. For if Mr. Binky jumps headfirst, we may witness an unwitting demonstration of the wisdom of Billy Mitch.e.l.l."

Soon after, Rupert Binky was killed by an enraged swan on the river Isis in Oxford. A group of Magdalen College oarsmen, weary from a b.u.mp race, had heard his last words, which were,"Crush The Sun." Far from being the mystical and elevated utterance that they thought it was, this was a specific instruction immediately grasped by his grandson, Craig Binky, who then took it upon himself to avenge his grandfather as if the swan had been a trained a.s.sa.s.sin in the pay of Harry Penn.

The means at his disposal were most impressive. To begin with, he had the Binky zillions and The Ghost circulation base. But with just those, an attack upon The Sun would have been no more effective than an a.s.sault upon its natural counterpart. Though Craig Binky thought that his stratagems were the cause of The Sun's occasional misfortunes, he was, in fact, a.s.sisted by a mammoth presence invisible to him and to many othersa"the times themselves. Many skills and arts had atrophied, the public was not what it had once been, and most of the population sat immobile for a third or more of its waking hours, absorbing without reaction or resistance whatever they saw on their televisions. Morals and mores had become so rational and progressive that criminals and prost.i.tutes resurrected from another age would have faced neither barriers nor censure. In fact, a criminal such as Peter Lake would have been greatly offended by the dishonesty and corruption of the norm, and disoriented by the general refusal to distinguish between right and wrong. The city ha rotted, until the anarchy was such that islands of reconst.i.tution were allowed to thrive within it. These islands steadily grew. Amid waters that were anything but pure, they were like a rising reef, and though they were rising slowly, when the force that carried them finally broke the surface, it would break it all at once.

The Sun was such an island, threatened by the swollen seas which Craig Binky swam like a fisha"and always with the current. While Harry Penn stood as firm as a rock in the rapids, Craig Binky had a marvelous, easy time flipping about in the foam. He could Iten thousand times more readers for a Ghost article about the newest wet-look roller-dancing costume than Harry Penn could find readers for a Sun essay on colonizing the moon, and The Ghost's investigation of the aphrodisiacal qualities of creme de caramel created more revenue than the entire Sun series on the brilliant new pract.i.tioners of electronic music.

And yet The Sun thrived. Still, Harry Penn was not content to share The Sun with only its minority of careful and intelligent readers, for he wanted it not just to survive, but to triumph. This had little to do with The Ghost, though admittedly The Ghost was a dreadful irritant: it had to do with his sense of order and his vision of the world. Harry Penn wanted The Sun to fight The Ghost and all it stood for, if never on its own terms, then at least on its own ground. So he marshaled his troops and sent them to fight Craig Binky. Because they would not use Ghost methods or cater to broken tastes, they fought at a continual disadvantage. But the disparity fired their imaginations.

Although The Sun was the model of accuracy and formality inits news pages, its editorial section covered a wider spectrum, and was divided up like a parliament into warring factions. Editorial I was a page devoted to sober, dignified, and eclectic a.s.sessments not unlike those of editorial pages in other great newspapers around the world, except that you were less likely to know what The Sun would say, because its politics were so fluid, practical, and idiosyncratic. In Editorial II, the Right was allowed a full page to present, often admirably and brilliantly, its completely predictable line. So with Edtorial III, a full page for the Left. Editorial IV, however, was controversial, for in it The Sun columnists and guests were encoured to write without regard to libel or any other consequences, though by some sort of unwritten code abusiveness and sensationalism were filtered from articles that might otherwise have been vitriolic or provocatory. In writing for Editorial IV, in fact, Virginia Gamely, now Marratta, began to push her luck.

She started out gently, but was soon caught up in a compulsionthe origins of which she did not understand. This was not a surprising pattern, for in Lake of the Coheeries the biggest blizzards, the ones that covered the houses and made the countryside like a rolling white sea, always started with small tentative flurries that were nearly invisible. At first, Virginia's columns went largely unnoticed, for they were appreciations of a city that loomed so fiercely in the eyes of its inhabitants that they were seldom able to apprehend it as a whole. The irony of its beauty was that they, who made it, could not see it. They were too busy rus.h.i.+ng and fighting, lost within it like mites.

Virginia often accompanied Hardesty and Marko Chestnut on their long walks in search of forgotten architecture and revelatory views. When they found a subject, she would wander off to the side, to a scrub-covered lot or a flight of stone stairs, and watch them work. While they sketched and made notes, she would fix her gaze upon a scene, either the one they had chosen or one close by. For example, she might watch the afternoon light against a carved facade of reddish stone, and see that the light and the stone were in love, and that they moved back and forth in sympathy like two sea fans in the same transparent current. She could hear in the traffic a white sound that threw veils across the present and allowed her to hold the scene to her the way that she held her own childrena"fighting time, conquered by it, ravished by it. For she believed that only through love can one feel the terrible pain of time, and then make it completely still. She followed the sway of reeds in windy, broken, summer lots, until they swayed no more and she saw them motionless and within a stopped frame. And then she would walk back to The Sun and write essays that drove Craig Binky and his readers crazy, because Virginia saw the world not as a system of material blocks in which one thing was connected to another, but, rather, as a magnificent illusion of the spirit. In one essay she wrote about the dome or the old police headquarters and how it managed to "watch the city by means of its shape, for," she wrote,"apart from the inexplicable magic of color, images are transmitted and received in terms of shape. The receptors themselves are of a recognizable, constant form that is derived from the attributes of light. After all, what we see of the eye is itself a dome." In these speculations, she explained the quality or the air in the morning light. And she went on from there, in a vein that was simultaneously metaphysical and sensual, to talk about ultimate purpose, symmetry, beauty, G.o.d, the devil, balance, justice, and time. This was a Coheeries trait. They were always very serious up there, and in matters of nature and religion they could talk wallpaper off the wall, with the patience and intensity of nineteenth-century German philosophers.

When Harry Penn read the first of these essays, he called Virginia into his office.

"Do you realize," he asked right off the bat,"that because of these essays The Sun will be viciously attacked?"

Virginia was so surprised that she couldn't reply.

"Do you?"

"No," she answered."Attacked? For what reason? Who?"

He closed his eyes for a moment, and nodded in confirmation of his own suspicions."Sit down," he said, and proceeded to explain to her in fatherly fas.h.i.+on about the savagery of intellectual dispute in a city where many held the intellect above nature."Most people," he told her,"arrive at tortured conclusions via blind and painful routes. They don't like it when someone like you shows up in a balloon. You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't, know only reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they will never believe you. This is the great division of the world, and always has been. When reason and revelation run together, why, then you have something, a great age. But, in the city, now, reason is predominant. To argue from any other point of view or by any other means, as you do, is subversive. You will be attacked. Perhaps if we run your pieces in the religion department, alongside the sermon summaries, they won't create so much controversy..."

"What controversy?" she interrupted."There hasn't been any controversy."

"There will be."

She found this hard to believe.

"Where are you from, young lady?" he inquired.

"From Lake of the Coheeries. When I arrived in New York, I stayed with Jessica at your house. You were in j.a.pan."

"You are little Virginia Gamely?"

"Not anymore," she said with a smile, because she towered over him.

"I hadn't realized," said Harry Penn, looking directly at her "I'll be interested to see your columns as they appear."

"I don't really remember you," she said.

"The last time I saw you," Harry Penn replied,"you were a very young child. You wouldn't have remembered."

What Harry Penn had predicted came to pa.s.s. Virginia was attacked from several quarters, and treated as if she had suggested that the city's children be forced to drink hemlock. The Ghost hit her on its front page, ignoring the news of the world to castigate her and The Sun for "religious reactionism. There are court rulings against this sort of thing," they wrote,"and it should be suppressed in the name of modernity and good sense." Not that Craig Binky held that opinion (he generally didn't know what opinions he held), but this seemed to him to be the way people were thinking. Other publications, too, rammed her broadside, but in a less than energetic, condescending fas.h.i.+on. This was because they thought that since she was new it would not take much to sink her. Such mistakes are often made in wartime.

Virginia had seen Mrs. Gamely pick up her shotgun and pump away at marauders in the night, and in many respects she was just like her mother, which is not to say that the course she chose was wise or correcta"it was neithera"but, rather, that it was spirited. Abandoning caution, she took out after her enemies.

A Ghost editorial questioned the propriety of the complex essays on esthetics that were regularly appearing in The Sun: "Does the man on the street, in his millions, be he Hincky, Lester, Jocko, Alphonse, or John, have any understanding whatsoever of the mystico-religious obsession that has seized The Sun?" Soon after, Harry Penn looked up over his ancient leather-covered desk to see Praeger de Pinto and Hugh Close standing opposite. His editor-in-chief and his chief-of-rewrite were involved in a dispute about the wisdom of running Virginia's answer to The Ghost.

"Mr. Penn," implored Hugh Close,"we simply cannot print this article anywhere, except, perhaps, in Editorial IV. No, not ever there." He held up a copy sheet that was t.i.tled,"Oh Ghost, where is thy sting?"

All the while, Praeger de Pinto was silent.

"Please look at it, sir," Close pleaded."Let me call your attention to lines such as these: *I would rather be torn to pieces by the poison-clawed cat, than suffer one instant of acceptance by the resident intellectuals of The Ghost.... Men like Myron Holiday, Wormies Bindabu, and Irv Lightningcow don't know their a.s.ses from their elbows, much less how to see the truth. Just yesterday, for example, Myron Holiday wrote in his column that Oliver Cromwell was a famous bullfighter, and that strategic bombing was introduced in the War of 1812.... The rationalists of The Ghost are mechanistic beasts who thrive in darkness and wither in the light of the sun. If they pa.s.s within twenty feet of a bottle of milk, it sours. They live at c.o.c.ktail parties full of unkempt women who are always smoking cigarettes, they don't know how to swim, they frighten children, and they m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in bookstores.'

"We can't print things like that. Her brush is far too broad."

"However," said Harry Penn, holding up his index finger in a patriarchal gesture,"what she says is true. Put it on the front page."

"But, Mr. Penn," Close begged. He was the paragon of exact.i.tude, and such a careless, all-encompa.s.sing attack was contrary to his nature."It makes us so G.o.dd.a.m.ned vulnerable!"

Praeger de Pinto turned toward the window to hide his smile. He knew Harry Penn better than anyone alive.

"Close, our indiscretions sometimes serve us well," Harry Penn wheezed."For a divinity shapes our ends. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Runneth it on page one."

"Page one?" Realizing that he was not going to win, Close tried to trim his losses.

"Page one."

"Page one?"

"What are you?" Harry Penn asked."A parrot?"

Virginia was pacing back and forth in the roof garden. The Sun did fire people, and she had gone too far. Defiance and remorse alternated in such strong waves that she felt as if she were in the crow's nest of a s.h.i.+p with a fifty-degree roll. When Praeger approached her with a grave and frozen look set upon his face, she thought the worst.

He stared at her for a moment, watching her begin to fall apart.

Then he launched her to the moon by telling her that he and Harry Penn were going to print her polemics on the front page. But he told her as well that it had been a close call, and that if she wanted to live dangerously she could make a lot more money driving nitroglycerine trucks. Nonetheless, she walked across the roof garden with a May stride. When she went down to the city room to tell Hardesty, he, too, cautioned her to be careful.

She was, for an entire day. After that, she reverted to her old ways. She was afraid, but she pushed ahead unmindful of the hazards. Perhaps it was because the Coheeries people were descended from the audacious raiders of the French and Indian Wars. Perhaps it was because she felt that she was caught in a deep and clear backwater of time, or because she was a daring believer well versed in the omnipotence of G.o.d and nature. Or perhaps it was because she was just a little bit out of her mind.

Virginia's conflict with The Ghost's intellectuals and their followers was soon stalemated, as both sides exhausted themselves heaving into one another's camps huge unsupportable generalities that were more taxing to deliver than to sustain.

Each article brought pressures for her removal, both from within and from without The Sun. At every juncture, however, Harry Penn intervened to protect her. No one understood why, especially in light of the fact that even his own daughter, Jessica, sometimes received scathing reviews in double salvos from Sun and Whale.

After the first reprieve, Virginia had felt the near miss reverberating through her in the same way that a knife-thrower's a.s.sistant feels the vibrations of the board against which her back is motionlessly pressed. The second time, she had swung gaily in a hammock supported by the twin posts of relief and grat.i.tude. The third time, it had seemed rather humorous. The fourth time, after a column ent.i.tled "The Mayor Looks Like an Egg. Period," she had expected it. And the fifth time, after "Craig Binky and the Question of Mental Nudity," she would have been surprised had the reprieve not come.

No one on The Sun had ever been treated with such deference. She was free to do anything she wanted to do, and took risks enough in a week to last a lifetime. Those of good will suspected that Harry Penn's advanced age had led him to experiment in folly. According to loose tongues, she had become his mistress. But Harry Penn remained alert and dapper. Always in tweed, he sported a gold-handled ebony cane with which he poked dogs who were fouling a footpath, and though he was still able, every now and then, to toss a harpoon, he clearly was well past the age for having a mistress, or even trying. His solicitude for Virginia Gamely remained a mystery.

... AND THE GHOST.

LOOK, there is no sane organized way to describe The Ghost, and no place to start. The Ghost was circular and rotund in time, and it was laid out in complete chaos. It crawled with absolutely serious people demanding an infinite variety of insane things. For example, at one time, a major crisis occurred when the newspaper divided into two factionsa"those who said that white wine came from fish and those who maintained that it didn't, although they either would not or could not say where it did come from. They shunned each other like Huguenots and Walloons and for eight c nine months, The Ghost appeared with many blank s.p.a.ces, missing pictures, and upside down or sideways articles, because the faction would not cooperate. Craig Binky conferred with his advisers, and then did exactly what he had wanted to do anyway. Calling the boardhack together, he announced: "Gentlemen, you remember the story of the Accordion Knot. Pepin the Short, when presented with the Accordion Knot, couldn't untie it. So he set it on firea"just like the Russians and their Pumpkin Villages. I plan to follow the same strategy; with adaptations for this, a more euphonious age." He then proceeded to fire every single one of The Ghost's eleven thousand employees. The next day, The Ghost was completely empty, even of rats, and this might have knocked some sense into the feuding employees, had Craig Binky not given each of them three years' severance pay. For five or six weeks, The Ghost and its subsidiary enterprises were as dark as a moonless night in a cave, while an army of professional skip tracers roamed the French and Italian Rivieras.

The lesson of Craig Binky was quite simple. As Virginia wrote to sum up her interview with the editor and publisher of The Ghost: "Too much power makes for the ridiculous. It is as true for politics, in which the powerful are often brought down by their own pomposity, as it is in religion, in which the man who sees angels returns most times with a tale of harlequins; as it is in newspaper publis.h.i.+ng, in which being a mirror to the world makes fools of those who would say what it is and what it is not. Of course, someone always has to risk saying what is and what is not. Those who do so in ignorance of their place in nature, however, bring down upon themselves things such as Craig Binky's carefully rendered judgment that *white wine does not, in fact, come from fish, or from any other mammal. It is made by pressing the juice of the immature zucchini.'"

But The Ghost's board of directors were irreversibly intimidatedby the Binky zillions, and dared not contradict their chief. Although at times they would beg him not to do this or that, it was always in the tones of garden mice. His power over them was nearly absolute. For example, he made them change their names to the guide words the bindings of The Encyclopedia Britannica. This was so that he could remember better who they were, since he spent a lot of time taring at his encyclopaedia. Reluctantly, they became Bibai Coleman, Hermoup Lally, Lalo Montpar, Montpel Piranesi, Scurlock Tirah, Arizona Bolivar, Bolivia Cervantes (the only female member), Ceylon Congreve, Geraniales Hume, Newman Peisistratus, Rubens Somalia, and Tirane Zywny, who, to his everlasting shame, shared his appellation with the rat-catching Zywny, a type of dog.

Flanked by his two blind bodyguards, Alertu and Scroutu, Craig Binky marched into a monthly board meeting. As usual, he had a sheaf of new proposals and projects (which he called "projectiles") all of which the board was obliged to approve.

"First of all," he said,"I want to let me thank you for the compliment of calling you here. What I mean is to say that, frankly, how nice I am to meet you. Well! How the day is! The sun s.h.i.+nes in blarts and twines, and everything sustantiates. So, you see, what a pleasure it is to address you, from me, your friend and chairmana" always concerned, never happy, and quite willing to talk it over, yesterday, today, or tomorrow." Then he swiveled in his chair and stared out the window for five minutes. It bothered him not at all that his board members were sitting rigidly at attention behind him. Sometimes he left them that way for an hour. What did he care? He paid them each $200, 000 a year to applaud politely when he came in, to nod and widen their eyes at his suggestions and proposals, to call each other by the names he had made them adopt, to discuss the things he said, in big words that he didn't understand, and then confirm that it was a brilliant idea, for example, to grow mushrooms in unused safe deposit boxes. He swung back around."Lalo, Hermoup, Bolivia, Bibai, Montpel, Newman, Tirane, Ceylon, Geraniales, Arizona, Scurlock. I'm glad you're all here, glad you're all mortal. Listen to this.

"What would happen if we took everything that exists in the universe, and divided it by one? I'll tell you. It would remain the same. So, therefore, how do we know that someone isn't doing that right now, at this very instant? It makes me shudder to think of it. We might be constantly divided by one, or multiplied by one for that matter, and we wouldn't even know it!"

Everyone feigned a look of wonder, turned to his neighbor, and sat erect again, waiting for what was next.

"Let me enumerate today's points, if I will, beginning with number A.

"Number two. I've thought about it, and I don't like it. As far as I'm concerned, it's out the window, finished, caveat."

"Good idea," said Scurlock Tirah (whose real name was Finny Pealock).

"Number L. We're somewhat behind the times in corporate organization. Marcel Apand was telling me about a little electronics company he set up in India. He got a business school to design it from the floor up, and I really like the way they did it. So, as of next Monday, The Ghost parent corporation will be recast into cl.u.s.ters, macrocl.u.s.ters, microcl.u.s.ters, pods, micropods, minipods, macro-pods, macronuggets, supernuggets, bulbo-aggregates, and pings. Some departments will tie into other cl.u.s.ters, pods, nuggets, bulbo-aggregates, and pings, and some will remain essentially stable. For example, a secretary in what is now the secretarial pool of the real estate section of the cla.s.sified department, will henceforth be referred to as a ping in the secretarial cl.u.s.ter of the real estate pod in the cla.s.sified macronugget. This, of course, is in turn a bulbo-aggregate of the revenue-generating supernugget."

The board sat with nervous smiles on their faces, feet tapping, fingers drumming, eyes darting from side to side.

For the next two and a half hours, during which he was served a seven-course lunch as everyone else looked on, empty-stomached and salivating, Craig Binky held forth, and ideas flowed from him in manic density. He firmly believed that he was the center of the universe, that, a thousand years in the future, people would refer to the late twentieth century as "The Age of Craig Binky," to its music and art as "Binkian," or "Binkyesque," or "Binkotic." He had even flirted with the idea of "Binkonian," "Binkese" (which, in fact, did exist), and "Binkritude."

The Ghost itself was a puzzling doc.u.ment. Unlike The Sun and most other newspapers, it was run by headline writers. Over the years, the success of their sensational declarations had transformed them into a caste of elevated mandarins, and they discovered that their headings did not need to have any bearing whatsoever on the copy below. A story ent.i.tled "Mercy Killing in Manila," for example, might well be about the Norwegian building boom, or about a department store in Hartford, Connecticut."Queen Goes Nude in London," was about a new form of insect repellent developed at the University of Iowa. And below "African Playboy Kills Self," was the n.o.bel Prize acceptance speech of a Harvard biochemist. The front page of The Ghost, as might be expected in a tabloid, was all headline, and as often as not, in red. Unlike the other tabloids that it had long before knocked out of the picture, however, The Ghost had headlines unaccompanied by any story. It didn't seem to make any difference. Millions bought the paper no matter what. Harry Penn's favorite example of a Ghost banner headline with no further explanation was framed in his office. In huge block type, it read: "Dead Model Sues Race Horse."

Still, The Ghost grew, and so did the billions. It was as if Craig Binky was protected by an angel.

And if one were to believe The Ghost's editor and publisher, there was an angel. Once, Craig Binky had stormed into Harry Penn's office, demanding that The Sun close down immediately. When asked to explain his audacity, he replied that an angel had come to him, thrown plastic nets over his body, imprisoned his will, and told him to make this exact demand. Harry Penn was eating a piece of hard candy, something which always made him seem even cooler and more ironic than he actually was. As he thought, the candy went from side to side in his mouth, like a die in a dice cup. Finally, he held it still."Craig," he asked,"did the angel give you a receipt?" Silence ensued, during which Craig Binky's apparent inability to overcome this hurdle flooded the room as if it had been hundreds of silver dollars that had burst through his pockets, fallen like a waterfall inside his pant legs, paid out over his feet, and rolled everywhere."Because, Craig," Harry Penn insisted,"if you don't have a receipt, we can't accept the claim as valid."

But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to be triumphal. Harry Penn was certain that in his nearly one hundred years he had never encountered a soul more intensely marinated in self-satisfaction. Craig Binky's pomposity was often relieved, for others, by what Harry Penn generously termed "Mr. Binky's somewhat inexact intelligence."

Partly to crowd out other opinions, and partly to make his views become known, he craftily filled the letters page of The Ghost with anonymous communications which he signed "Craig B." Even if thathadn't given him away, most people would have been able to guess who had written the letters, because his style and syntax were unmistakable: "Craig Binky says that there are too many water fountains on the third floor. Craig Binky says take some away." His sentences frequently included a subject that was its own predicate: "The Ghost, New York's most beloved newspaper, published and edited by Craig Binky, is The Ghost."

He was proud that he knew so many influential people, drank expensive wines (and water imported from a frozen spring in Sakhalin), and went to restaurants where a piece of toast (Toast Almondine, Toast en gelee, Toast Safand) was priced at the equivalent of fourteen hours of the minimum wage. He seemed to himself to be genuinely superior. Perhaps for that reason he regularly arranged testimonial dinners in his own honor. Still, Craig Binky and The Ghost were the necessary counterbalance for Harry Penn and The Sun. There could not have been one without the other, somewhere, in some form. As it happened, they faced one another across Printing House Square.

IF all the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun or ended. This was apparent even to Craig Binky.

On a day so fine that the pressmen sat lazily in the sum, watching bees, when tranquil opera music welled up in peaceful, darkened streets, and when trees took the early summer breezes through new jewel-like leaves, a messenger sped in from the airport in a Ghost helicopter. Before it landed on The Ghost roof, the messenger jumped onto the helipad, injuring his leg John Wilkes Booth style, and ran toward Craig Binky's office.

He broke past the receptionist and dashed into Craig Binky's inner sanctum. Alertu and Scroutu locked arms and stood to, barring the door through which Craig Binky was visible addressing a board meeting. Betty Wasky, his secretary, arose from her station and implored the stranger to be patient."These guys are blind," the messenger said, sizing up Alertu and Scroutu."I don't want to hurt them." Such strong talk impressed Betty Wasky, who went to fetch her chief. Craig Binky took the messenger into his private office, and emerged five minutes later shouting orders.

He dismissed the board and ordered up the fleet of corporate planes."Wind them up!" he shouted. A phone call to the airport readied all of The Ghost's small air force. The aircraft honored to receive Craig Binky would take off in the lead, with the rest following in an armada of gleaming t.i.tanium and screaming engines. When Craig Binky flew, a hundred planes took wing, like the doves that were released to greet a Roman general returning in triumph. In the largest plane of the fleet, a giant commercial craft, he had installed an elevated seat that enabled him to look out from a plastic bubble on the roof of the fuselage. A familiar sight at the New York airports, this aircraft would start out for the far-flung reaches of the Ghost empire, with Craig Binky's head visible in the bubble.

That day, the airport was gripped with excitement as a hundred planes rose into the air one after another as if on a bombing raid. They threw the controllers into chaos, for their hastily filed flight plans said they were going to Brownsville, Texas, but they all veered eastward, out to sea.

"Where the h.e.l.l is he going?" one controller asked as the armada dipped low and disappeared from the radar screens. He received no answer, because no one knew, except Craig Binky. And Craig Binky wasn't telling.

AN EARLY SUMMER DINNER AT PETIPAS.

ON the same day that Craig Binky took off for Brownsville and then veered mysteriously out to sea, a group of journalists and managers from The Sun met for an early summer dinner at Petipas. As they sat in the garden, blinded by the white and gold flare of the setting sun, they heard a fleet of airplanes racing across the sky in the distance, and they wondered what it was.

They had just finished their last task of the day, which was to transfer material to The Whale for reprinting. After an early dinner, a quiet walk, and a good sleep, they would be at The Sun by 6:00 am. to start work on the edition that had to be put to bed by 2: 30 the following afternoon. After transferring their stories, checking the Plates, and organizing the next day's work, they would usually be through at about 7:00 pm.

They liked to meet at Petipas, because it was quiet and airy, and yet they could see river traffic heading down from the north, and hear lonely trucks driving across the cobbles of the deserted market. The sound of the wheels on the cobbles was inexplicably comforting. Best of all were the surprised emotional cries of the tugs and the ferriesa"the New Weehawken, the Staten Island, the Upper River, the New Fultona"as they echoed around the harbor and off the cliffs of the financial district. Plaintive, foggy, and full of the afternoon, the whistle blasts were unmistakably altered by their multiple courses through the shady canyons. In the east, a thousand golden fires reflected from the windows of loft buildings and brick warehouses the color of oxblood, and illuminated the cake-white munic.i.p.al towers that had statues, colonnades, and extraordinary nests of detail so far above the street and beyond human view that the stuff must have been intended for birds. Across the river was an eighteenth-century knoll with trees standing upon it like peasant women with arms akimbo, and the spotlight of the sun firing their green tops, while black shadows below suggested a grove of infinite proportions. Harry Penn stared at the dark anchoring of this grove, and saw in the velvet tunneling exactly where he was soon to go. He sensed in the darkness sheathed by brilliant light the compressive presence of the future and the past running together united, finally come alive.

He turned from the hypnotic blackness of the trees to his daughter and the others. In their youth, their pa.s.sions, and their enthusiasms, they were like a group of singers onstage, whose mobile laughter and expressive limbs were dreamlike under strong light. With age, their energies would transform into the powers of contemplation and memory. And the dreams that would bring back to them the people they had loved and the landscapes of thirty thousand days would be more than a match for the decades of youth in which they ran about dodging brewery trucks and trying to make a living. If in another three-quarters of a century they would be like the old man, in the garden at Petipas, who was so delighted by their grace and animation, they would be lucky. For Harry Penn was a happy man, content to remember.

This dinner was for fifteen. Hardesty Marratta, Virginia, and Marko Chestnut sat at the end of a long table, opposite Harry Penn.

Asbury and Christiana were in the middle. (Asbury had caught the halibut that was fragrantly grilling over charcoal.) Courtenay Favat had left his chair to make notes in the kitchen, and Lucia Terrapin blushed every time a burly pressman named Clemmys Guttata looked her way. Acquainted with the Penn tradition, Hugh Close was working intently at table, caught up in a gin and tonic, and a dispatch he was rewriting with the enthusiasm of a symphony conductor. Delighted with a stock market that had closed like Halley's comet on its upward swing, Bedford looked dreamily at the maroon-and-white tugboats skating slowly over the silver Hudson. Awaiting Praeger de Pinto, Jessica Penn was bent over the menu, studying it as if it were the Rosetta Stone. She was notoriously tight with money. Praeger himself was due to arrive any minute with Martin and Abby Marratta, whom he was to have picked up in Yorkville after interviewing the bedridden mayor. In early June, various pollens always did the mayor in. A waiter put down two enormous platters of smoked salmon, black bread, and lemon. There were the general oohs and ahs.

Then Praeger de Pinto came in carrying Abby, with Martin bird-d.o.g.g.i.ng him all over the place, since Martin was of the age during which a child cannot sit still. Praeger handed Abby to Virginia, like a package. Abby, who was not yet three, looked with great disapproval at the adults, wiggled out of Virginia's arms, and went in a postnap ill-temper to stare at the charcoal glowing under slabs of gently sizzling fish. Martin soon joined her, to demonstrate how leaves of gra.s.s burned on the grill.

"Did you hear?" Praeger asked."This afternoon Craig Binky got a bee in his bonnet, rushed to the airport, and took off in all one hundred of his planes without saying where he was going."

"He doesn't usually do that," Harry Penn commented."What's on the wires?"

"Nothing, absolutely nothing, a lot of repet.i.tions and human interest stories. You know. A woman in St. Petersburg was bitten by a rhesus monkey."

"Maybe," Hardesty speculated,"that's the story Craig Binky wants to get."

"Craig Binky doesn't sacrifice a June weekend in East Hampton tor anything," Bedford a.s.serted.

"Are you sure there's nothing on the wires?" Harry Penn asked again."Phone the office and check. If there's some real news, I don't want to have to find out about it in The Ghost. Something must be going on. Virginia, would you call the air traffic controllers? Hardesty, please call The Ghost and ask them point-blanka"maybe they'll tell you."

As the calls were being placed from the restaurant's lobby, Harry Penn jumped up to pace the narrow row of flagstones between the table and the grills. Hands behind his back, head bent, swinging at the turns like a tiger who always brushes against the exact same spot on the bars of his cage, he caught Abby's fancy, and she began to follow him, mimicking his pace and posture. And when he spoke, she mimicked his words but since she was unused to speaking in long sentences, her version of what he said was incomprehensible.

Harry Penn turned to look at her in delighted amazement."You're a brave little la.s.s, aren't you?" he asked. Then he swung around and they both resumed the pacing.

"What's on the wires?" Harry Penn asked Praeger as he came onto the terrace.