From Time to Time

6

JULIA WALKED INTO THE DINING room, set down the big blue-and-white platter of waffles, then walked around to her side of the table. She didn’t speak, though I knew she was going to and what she would say. She pulled out her chair first, sat down, managing her long skirts, inched her chair in, slid her napkin from its carved-bone ring, unrolled it on her lap, then placed her bare forearms on the white cloth, wedding ring catching the light for a moment. Watching me, hunting for signs of my mood, she pushed the syrup in its cut-glass flask closer to my reach.

Finally, voice gentle so as not to rile me, she said, “Si. It’s so far away now. And doesn’t really concern you. Not anymore. Your Major Prien has had his Project to himself now for—is it three years? Or more. And whatever he’s done with it is done.”

I nodded, knowing I ought not be irritable—because I’d had the same guilty thoughts. For months at a time I’d forget the Project, then it would come sneaking back into my mind. I glanced irritably around the room; I didn’t like breakfast in here. Too damn dark. Fine at night, winter especially, when we used the fireplace; this was a different room then. But a house stood wall-to-wall on each side of ours, no light in here except for the chandelier over the table. I preferred the big round wood table in the kitchen, the room full of daylight from two tall, round-topped windows overlooking Julia’s little garden. But eating in the kitchen was unseemly to Julia, and I understood that.

I said, “Julia, I’d like nothing more than to just forget the Project. If I’d only been able to do what I tried to do.” I sat thinking about that. “As I almost did, God damn it.”

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said automatically.

“If I’d done it. If I’d got to the theater just minutes earlier . . .” I smiled at her, and shrugged. “I could have stayed right here then, content forever. But it keeps coming up in my mind, Jule: What is Rube doing with the Project? What is he up to! It may be a kind of duty to go and find out.”

She leaned toward me over the table. “Then go. Get it over with.” She sat back, keeping her face pleasant, and said gently, “But come back.”

“House,” said Willy on the floor. He was sitting, his back against the wall, legs straight out, turning the linen pages of one of his picture books, touching each and every picture with a fat little forefinger and saying or trying to say its name. He was over three now; talking and edging toward reading as fast as he could go. He was fun, and of course Julia and I looked over at him now, then at each other to smile: we’d made this little man.

“I might not be able to go back.”

“Oh? Why?” She sliced into her waffle with a fork.

“I was in the Central Park a couple weeks ago. Sketching the swan boats for last week’s issue.”

“Yes. I believe I’d like to frame that one.”

“Yeah, it’s a good one. But while I was there, walking along near the Dakota, it got dark, and I glanced up at my old apartment. I always do.”

“So do I. I had Willy there a week or so ago, and I showed it to him.”

“You didn’t tell him—”

“Of course not. Just said Daddy once lived there.”

“Well, when I looked up at it, the windows were lighted. People living there. I couldn’t use it to go back.”

“Is there no other vacant?”

“Wouldn’t help; it might be occupied in the twentieth century, no way to tell. To go back, I’d need a new Gateway, Jule, a place that exists in both times, so that—”

“I know, Si, I know.”

“Well, Einstein said—”

“I do not want to hear about Einstein again. Or Gateways, or anything el—”

“He’s alive, you know.”

“Who?”

“Einstein.” She put both hands over her ears, and I smiled. “Just think, he’s alive at this very moment. Still a little kid, I think. Maybe about Willy’s age. Playing somewhere in Germany right now, and already thinking thoughts beyond me. Maybe looking at a book and saying, ‘Haus.’ ”

“Would you like another waffle?”

“Gotta leave.” I pushed back my chair, and Julia stood, turning to scoop up Willy and carry him to the front windows to wave goodbye, important to him and to me.

Today I didn’t walk to work; coming down the front steps, I saw a cab waiting across the Park and decided to take it, turning to wave to Willy, grinning at me behind the window, flapping his hand. Then I walked over to the cab. I wore a derby, and my brown suit.

At the cab I said, “Leslie’s,” waiting to see if he knew where it was. He did, and I climbed in as he got down to take away the horse’s leather feed bag. “Take Broadway,” I called to him, and settled back.

I liked the cabs. They weren’t quite comfortable; big leaf springs, very stiff, and you moved along steadily but in a just barely perceptible series of jerks from the slow trot of the horse. Some people didn’t like that, but it didn’t bother me. They were likely to be dirty, too, and even smell a little. Julia and I once piled into one after the theater, and got right out again. But this one was okay, and I liked the snug way the double doors closed down over your lap.

The day was sunless, no sky, just an even grayness, almost whiteness, a light fall of snow on the ground. Been gray like this for a week, not cold. We turned west on Twentieth Street, and I sat back. I knew it was true, that I was afraid of returning to my own time. Afraid of what I’d find happening at the Project, what dreadful thing I’d be helpless to stop. Stay here, stay here, my mind told me; what you don’t know won’t hurt you.

Down Fourth Avenue . . . past Union Square . . . west on Fourteenth . . . then onto Broadway. Not the quickest route on a weekday morning, but I needed this time to myself. We jiggled along further downtown, and Broadway became more and more crowded in the morning rush until finally, down near Trinity Church, it got too much.

This is where we were, the traffic even worse today because of a little snow and because the new horse-drawn streetcars—now added to the Broadway omnibuses—stood in several motionless little strings of three or four cars, their horses standing dumbly, tails switching, the drivers clanging their bells at the stalled traffic blocking them. This happened a lot now, because the cars, confined to their tracks, couldn’t turn out like the little buses. The old street was too narrow now: I’d seen buses simply turn off Broadway and go around a block to circumnavigate some snarl, reentering Broadway beyond it. Leaning out at the side of my cab, I could see that up ahead a dray loaded with empty barrels had tried to pull around a string of blocked streetcars, and met with a light delivery wagon trying the same thing from the opposite direction. The two drivers, standing before their seats, were doing the usual—yelling and waving their whips at each other. It’s not easy to back a wagon or dray, and neither one wanted to. A big mess, made a lot worse by the snow and stalled cars. I’d liked them at first; now I thought that on Broadway they were a nuisance.

I couldn’t just sit here waiting: I was due at work in eight minutes, and I pushed up the doors from over my lap and climbed down. I knew the fare from Gramercy Park to Leslie’s, and handed up the full amount plus a ten-cent tip, which was a proper one. But he didn’t thank me, and I understood; he was stuck here now without a fare, nobody would hail him till he got himself clear. So I got out my change, found another ten-cent piece for him, and this time got thanked. I had a couple of blocks to walk, and I set out.

Walking along through the morning crowd, I recognized again what I had slowly and reluctantly realized over the past year or so: that Broadway down here was just plain ugly. I couldn’t see that, when I first came to this place and time. Everything then, every sight and person I saw, every sound I heard, thrilled me. And I walked Lower Broadway, as everywhere else, in an ecstatic trance at simply being here. Pretty soon—this is what happened to me first—the buildings lining the street no longer looked old to my eyes. From my own time I could remember one or two of them, I’m certain, still existing on twentieth-century Lower Broadway, truly old to my eye and mind then, out of place in time. But here I’d watched some of these being built, watched the Irish hod carriers climbing their ladders in the mornings as I passed, seen the new bricks rising, finally, to five or six stories of new construction smelling of wet plaster. Many others of these were no more than five or ten years old. And now to my eyes they looked right, looked modern and were. And looked ugly, I also saw now, crammed together wall against wall, too high for their widths on the old narrow lots bought and built on one at a time, their uncoordinated rooflines jagged as broken teeth. And the street itself too narrow and now narrowed still more by the inflexible new car tracks. One morning last spring I’d walked by an impossible snarl of stalled traffic, the intersection a tangled struggling chaos, and seen an infuriated driver suddenly stand up before his seat and with his whip lash out and slash open the cheek of another driver, sending him to his knees at his wagon seat. The street was badly cobbled, City Hall graft, you heard. It was potholed. And the endless, endless banging ring of the iron-tired wheels against those uneven stones could drive you crazy. And always, always, Broadway was dusty or muddy or both. And always with plenty of horse manure, which dried and turned to gritty dust so that on a breezy day you had to carefully inhale through your nose and keep your eyes slitted. The sidewalks were an obstacle course from the wooden posts of rival telegraph lines, their overhead crossarms heavy with wire. Big black-and-white painted advertising signs defaced nearly every blank sidewall, other signs hung out over the walks. Now, and long since, I saw Broadway along there as it truly was, a drably, crudely utilitarian commercial street, not even attempting to be anything but what it so purely was: ugly. And I liked it. I loved it.

Walking along that Broadway, the sidewalks busy with men going to work—hardly any women—I thought, or tried to: What to do, what should I do, what did I want to do? Well, I knew what I wanted to do. Stay right here, back deep in the nineteenth century. But far ahead in time the Project was still functioning because of my failure to prevent it. So now wasn’t it my duty to see what Rube and Esterhazy were up to? The debate in my mind, I understood walking along the street, was repetitive, the question not answering itself. And I saw that all I could decide was simply that I had to decide—one way or the other, yes or no.

Then, up ahead I saw the Bird Lady. You’d see her now and then around town, on or near various busy street corners. This is a drawing of the Bird Lady, made a few months earlier by Pruett Share, one of our people at Leslie’s. For five cents she’d have one of her canaries dip his beak into an open box and pull out a small envelope for you. In it, printed not very well—on her own little handpress, I suspect—would be your fortune, reading about as you’d expect. Or, if you wished, she’d have the bird peck out from a back portion of the box a yes or no answer to whatever question you silently asked. People said she did good business with racetrack and other bettors.

I walked past her; today she stood at the doorway of a little dry goods store not yet open. No one took her fortunes or answers seriously, or wouldn’t say so, anyway. The Bird Lady was for fun, and I’d never seen anyone accept an envelope without grinning to show the world they weren’t serious. But I believe that underneath the newly evolved reasoning portion of our human minds, the old primitive way by which we actually reach our opinions and decisions still exists powerfully as ever. And no matter what common sense had to say to me about this, I slowed, hesitating, then turned back in the sudden, absolute knowledge that the Bird Lady was, really was, going to give me the proper decision.

I stopped on the walk before her as she smiled; then I pulled out a little handful of change and found a nickel: a nickel with a stars-and-stripes shield on its face and a big V on the reverse, which, I remembered every time I spent one, would one day be valuable. But it was only a commonplace nickel now, and I handed it over. She smiled again, inquiringly, and I said, “A question, please.” She moved the stick on which her bird perched to the back of the box, and waited a moment while I spoke my silent question: Should I visit my own time, if I can? Then I nodded at the Bird Lady. Her stick lowered, twitched its signal, and the little round yellow head instantly ducked and lifted a tiny envelope in its beak. Smiling, the Bird Lady handed it to me.

I took it, thanking her, and walked on, postponing because my heart was pounding. I made a smile, trying to laugh away my superstitious fear, but couldn’t. A dozen more yards, then suddenly I had to know, and stepped out of the pedestrian stream to stand with my back against a cigar store window. Beside me, a nearly life-sized enameled wooden figure of a kilted Scotchman holding out his wooden bundle of painted cigars. The little envelope flap was ungummed, tucked in, and I pulled it out, took the little fold of pinkish-gray paper, and hesitated. I glanced away, at the red cheek of the empty-eyed wooden face beside me. Then I silently spoke the question: Should I go back, if I can? I opened the slip, and it said: Yes.

I believed it. That coarse-fibered slip of cheap paper with its poorly imprinted three letters not quite aligned . . . pressed into this paper long before . . . told me what now I knew I would at least try. And I walked on to the office in the calm of quiet certainty, rolling the little paper to a pebble, then flicking it away to drop into the dirty Broadway gutter of 1886.

At noon I walked down the wooden interior staircase to our cashier’s office on the ground floor. He sat behind a black-painted metal grill on a high stool at a high desk where he received and paid out money. When I stopped at his window, he made a quarter-turn to face me, inquiringly. He did, in fact, wear a green eyeshade and black sleeve protectors to the elbows. I knew his name: Ben.

Ben counted out an advance, two days early, of my weekly salary, had me sign for it, then pushed it at me through the little opening—a small stack of bills, the top one a ten on the First National Bank of Galesburg, Illinois. I’d seen Ben count them, and didn’t bother to recount, just thanked him, then folded and shoved the bills deep into my pants pocket. These were big bills, seven inches long, a lot of paper, and made a fairly substantial wad, felt like real money.

Down on the street in the little dry goods store, the Bird Lady gone from its doorway, I bought a money belt. The proprietor, a short, bald, eager little European who didn’t really speak English yet, spread out a choice of belts on the countertop, some of leather, others of various kinds of cloth, including silk. They were widely used; few men traveled any distance without one. I took one of good lightweight canvas.

Lunch standing up in a saloon just east of Broadway, with half a glass of beer, leaving the rest; too foamy, the keg newly opened. A walk of a block and a half to my bank, where I withdrew almost half our savings, taking it in gold as many travelers did to save bulk, changing my pay advance to gold, too. Then back to the office to finish out the day, sketching from a photograph, then inking it in—another train wreck, this one near Philadelphia.