Ellis Island & Other Stories by Mark Helprin

phosphorescent burning was like a roar of light. A fireplace was in the room; a picture of Melville (the handsomest man I have ever seen, surely not so much for what he looked like but for what he was); wooden pegs on which to hang our goose vests and Christmas hats; shelves and shelves of illustrated books. Most remarkably, the ceiling was painted a deep luminous blue.
    As the days became calibrated into wide periods of light and dark, we lost track even of the weeks, much less the hours. Later, when I was wounded in war, they shot me full of morphine. The slow bodiless breathing was just like the way time passed in that crystalline January.
    We were possessed by the flawless isolation and the numbing cold. Perhaps we lost ourselves so easily because of the exquisite tiredness after so many hours outdoors, or perhaps because Julia and I had been waiting tensely and were suddenly freed. In the days, we rode the horses, and the dogs followed. At first, the four of us went out, with the children sitting forward on the saddles. Soon, though, I did my own riding. My grandmother and Julia would go back into the house and I would mount their horse. Then my grandfather and I galloped all over the island, dashing through the pines, crossing meadows, riding hard to prospects overlooking the thunderous white forks of the river. Much work was needed just to take care of the horses, to curry, to shovel, to fork down their hay from the loft. We split wood and carried it into the house, stocking all the fireplaces every night for at least one good burn. We baked pies according to a special system, in which my grandmother made pie for the grownups and we followed her, step by step, with a children’s pie, which, no matter what we did, always looked like a shanty. My sister kept the house completely free of dust. It was a game for her, and she polished everything in sight. “It’s sad,” said my grandfather.
    “Why?” asked his blue-eyed wife, still strikingly beautiful.
    “The child is so upset that she’s become obsessed. Today, she was dusting for two hours, telling herself stories and singing. She’s afraid to sit still.”
    “She’s as happy as she can be in the circumstances.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “How do you reach a child caught up like that? You can’t just talk to her.”
    “All we have to do is love her, and that’s easy.”
    In late afternoon as it grew dark we would come into the house and read, or be read to, until dinner. After we had cleaned up, we had a fire in the living room and read some more. An old radio brought in a classical station which sounded so far away that it seemed to be Swiss. Sometimes we took walks in the moonlight, and sometimes we stayed out for as long as we could and looked through a telescope at the moon and planets. By about eight, we were always so tired that we hardly moved, and just sat staring at the fire. Then my grandfather would throw on some logs and say, “Enough of this nonsense! Are we sloths? Certainly not. There are things to do. Let’s do them.”
    In a sudden burst of energy, my grandmother would go to the piano, he would return to his book, Julia would pull down the watercolors, the fire would blaze, and I would become hypnotized by Hottentots and Midwestern drainage canals within the dentist-yellow National Geographies. Then we would go to bed, as exhausted as if we had just spent time in a great city at Christmas. Sleep came easily when the nights were clear and the sky pulsed.
    But the nights were not always clear. In the middle of January, we had a great blizzard. We could neither ride, nor ski, nor walk for very long with the snowshoes. High drifts made it extremely difficult just to get the wood in. The sky was gray; my grandfather’s bad leg made him limp about; and we all began to grow pale. Instead of putting more logs on the fire and waking up, we let the flame go into coals, and we moved slowly upstairs to sleep. The blizzard lasted for days. We