From Time to Time

7

AT HOME IN OUR BEDROOM, a little before midnight, I dressed, Julia and I consulting about it in whispers. No overcoat, but a wool suit, we decided; if I needed an overcoat I’d buy a modern one. My suit was okay, I thought: single-breasted, the lapels very small, but acceptable. One button too many, but I could leave my coat open. Winter underwear, and pull-on boots. I owned a derby, a silk topper, a summer straw hat, my brimless winter cap, so we decided on no hat at all. My hair is straight, not quite black, fairly long and thick—thinning a little but hardly noticeable, Julia says. My ties were all wrong, but Julia got a wool scarf from my wardrobe and I put it on under my coat, crossed over my chest, concealing the absence of a tie. I checked my money belt, knowing I was wearing it, but checking anyway.

We had a full-length oval mirror by the window on its stand, and I walked over. Julia lighted a jet on the wall beside it, and we stood studying my costume, Julia in her long blue robe. I was wearing a full beard these days, close-cropped, and as always, examining myself in a mirror, I thought: Not handsome, but not too awful. I tried to picture myself walking along a late-twentieth-century street, and when Julia said, “Well?” I said, “Walk a block in twentieth-century Manhattan and you’ll pass plenty who look a lot freakier,” and Julia shook her head a little at the thought of the New York I was talking about.

Down in our hallway entrance at eleven-forty by our big standing clock, the hall light very low, as we always left it at night, Julia said quietly, “Now don’t worry about us; we’ll be fine,” and I kissed her goodbye, turned to leave, then swung back to hold and kiss her again. I’d suddenly felt as though I were leaving on a long and dangerous journey. And it was true that where I was going, if I could, was far, far away.

Then I reached for the door handle, and Julia said, “Wait!” and half ran a few steps to the big hall closet, felt around in a pocket of her winter coat, then turned to me, smiling, and handed me a copper one-cent piece. For an instant I thought she meant it as a kind of good-luck token; then I remembered. “Thanks, I forgot.” And now I did leave, out, down the front steps and into the silent night.

It wasn’t too far, and I walked along the dimly lighted, late-at-night, nineteenth-century streets, my boot heels too loud on the sidewalks. Through all of a long crosstown block I passed between two solid rows of brownstone houses, built side by side, walls touching, all identical on both sides of the street. Glancing now and then at a lighted upstairs window, I wondered about it, thinking of the people who lived in these streets now when these houses were new.

I turned a corner, passing a battered wagon parked at the curb, its empty single-horse shafts tipped up to lie angled back across the driver’s seat. Near the middle of the block, under the streetlamp, kids had been playing, the stone sidewalks scattered with chalked inscriptions. They didn’t say what I thought they would in the time I’d soon be trying to reach. Several simply announced that one first name loved another first name, and the most shocking among them told me only that Mildred stinks. Near the end of the block a man came walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the street. I could see that he was bent over, something big and bulky strapped to his back: a grindstone in a wooden cradle with a foot pedal. He was a street knife-sharpener; why he was out so late, I had no idea.

Then, rounding a corner, I saw it ahead, rising up against a sky luminous from the not-quite-full moon. Half a block further on, I stepped from stone walk onto wooden planking—a walkway, gradually ascending. I’d thought the little wooden booth just ahead might be closed, but it was still open, possibly to be closed in a few minutes, at twelve. Inside the tall booth, as I stopped before the little grilled window, sat a mustached man wearing a derby and smoking a pipe. I slid the one-cent piece, the toll Julia had remembered, across the wooden counter, polished and hollowed from use, and he said, “Thank you, sir.” A hundred yards or so further on, still climbing, I passed over the shoreline well below me now, and walked on out onto and up the long slow glorious curve of the new East River Bridge.

Far ahead, the immense, Gothic-arched stone wall of the Brooklyn tower stood black against the lighter dark of the sky, but beside me, widening out into their lovely fanlike pattern, each of the supporting cable strands stood clear and clean, stripes of moonlight. Walking steadily along beside the railing, my steps sounding on the wooden planking, I could see the river far below, blackness sprinkled with yellowed twistings of light. I couldn’t really see the water, but in my mind I could—the East River, always the same, opaque and soiled, no color, dull and sluggish. In the distance to the south I could make out a black bulk dimly lighted: a tug or barge.

Near the center of the long, long bridge, the massive supporting cable beside me at something near its lowest point, I sat down on the end of a bench, and turned to look out through the railings at the river. In the day just past, streetcars and other horse-drawn traffic had crossed this bridge endlessly. Pedestrians had moved ceaselessly along this very walkway, each paying his one-penny toll. This is a drawing I’d made for the paper a few months earlier, and while there were fewer boats, it is very much the place I saw now. Looking out at the river, I thought about other times, on nights and evenings, when I’d been here looking at this same river, the same great bridge towers, these very same cables beside me. This place, and all I looked at of its immediate surroundings, existed here now . . . just as they existed decades ahead, a true Gateway, equally a part of both times, belonging in and existing in each. And so, here on my bench in the quiet darkness, I began to think of the time ahead, working to remember, to get the feeling and the sense of the time I wanted to move into.

This was easier than trying to visualize and feel a past I had never seen, as I’d had to do the first time I tried to reach the nineteenth century. Now I knew the future I wanted to rejoin. Had seen and been part of it, knew it was there. From the roadway beside and below my walkway, I heard the steady approaching beat of hooves, then watched a roofed delivery wagon approach, the little flames of its sidelights jiggling, watched the roof slide away under my view, heard the wagon rattle and hoofbeats diminish. Then I sat, seeing nothing really, just staring down at the boards at my feet, and allowing scenes and pictures, memories, of late-twentieth-century New York to form in my mind, regaining the feel of my own time. Not forcing, just allowing it to form. And saw myself on the run through the rain one morning from bus stop to the ad agency where I worked. Which brought my drawing board there to mind, and the familiar view down onto Fifty-fourth Street from the window beside me. Leading to more thoughts of days and people of my time. To my little apartment on Lexington Avenue; small, noisy, and not enough daylight, I remembered too well. To the little lunchroom across the street where I usually had breakfast. And the laundromat. Movies . . .

It was there, my own time, the feel of it; I hadn’t forgotten. And now I began the almost effortless technique I’d learned so well. For many people self-hypnosis is impossible, but for others it isn’t hard; it’s used effectively for a lot of purposes. And I was far more than ordinarily skilled at it. Sitting here on my bench, entirely relaxed, simply staring, wide-eyed and hardly thinking, out at the river, I used my familiar skill to make this time, my life here in the nineteenth century . . . go still. Go silent, and contract. Go all tiny, and then into motionlessness. And presently I felt the strange indescribable drift, the familiar long moment of limbo between two times.

I stood, turning to face Manhattan, eyes not quite closed but looking down at the darkness of the wooden planks. Even before lifting my eyes I could already see in my mind the great rising, impossibly shining bulk of twentieth-century New York. Then I raised my head fast, eyes blinking to clear them, and stood stupidly bewildered.

I’d failed! There out before me in the moonlight lay the low-roofed old city I’d come from tonight, black dark now except for a speckling of dim pinpricks of light from gas or kerosene lamps, the church spires sharp black against the yellowed sky. And across the low roofs, across the entire width of the island, I saw the reflection of that sky lying on the water of the Hudson. And I felt—elation! I couldn’t do it, not anymore, I’d lost the ability! And was free to walk back down into that city, to Julia, Willy, Rover, back into the place and life I loved and wanted to stay in forever.

But didn’t. Because I knew. I knew what I’d done. Knew I’d sabotaged my own attempt, thinking of the drabbest aspects of my old life, of things I didn’t like, didn’t want to return to. And then sat watching myself, watching one part of my mind with another, refusing to let that time take hold, only pretending I’d felt it. I’d willed failure because I didn’t want to go, was afraid. Of . . . I didn’t know what. Of whatever I might find in the twentieth century. At the Project.

But I couldn’t let myself sneak back home knowing what I’d done. And I walked to the bridge rail, set my forearms on it comfortably, hands folded, staring down at the black of the river. And now I began allowing memories to rise and sharpen and come to life—not of a dingy apartment or a job I hadn’t liked, and the lonely times, but the memories I had just suppressed.

They came without volition, simply appeared as though I were watching a film. I saw four of us sitting on the great wide Fifth Avenue staircase of—yes, the Metropolitan Museum. Saw the enormous blue-and-white banner hung fifty feet above us across the facade. We sat far below it, lounging back on those steps in the late morning of a summer Sunday waiting for opening time. Sat casually talking with a lot of easy joking, no hurry about anything, aware of our pleasure in the feel of the sun and of the day itself. Yes.

And—well, of course the Village. Just wandering through the fine balmy night with—Grace Wunderlich? Yes, it was—the pair of us walking aimlessly, a part of the slow crowd flowing into and out of the open-doored, open-windowed places—the bars, the art shops, the cafes—the air murmuring and alive with voices.

Then a surprise: myself moving fast along a Second Avenue sidewalk at noon, a little warm and humid, the sidewalks jammed. But me moving swiftly along that walk through the crowd like a fish darting through weeds, my shoulders swinging sideways, hips twisting, slipping between, sliding past, darting around. Why was I standing here in the dark smiling at that? Because that had been fun: I was using a skill, the special acquired skill of moving fast through a New York crowd. Crazy, but I was smiling.

Standing in a line along the sidewalk outside the 8th Street Playhouse with Lennie Hindsmith, a fellow artist. We stood hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against a raw, partly rainy, partly misty evening with twenty minutes yet to wait, complaining to each other. This was boring, not worth it, maybe we ought to leave. But staying. Waiting to see a revival of a picture I’d heard and read about all my life, filmed before I was born. And complaining, I nevertheless continued to stand, inwardly and smugly happy with the knowledge that there was no other place in the world where I could be doing just this.

Strolling around the great plaza of Lincoln Center at intermission time with a girl I knew for a while, out in the open there looking up at the people, some in formal evening clothes, behind the glass on the chandelier-lighted staircase, aware that in this particular moment this was the best place in the world to be. Followed instantly by the memory of an Off-Off-Broadway play, or maybe even further off than that, in a moldering building deep in an East Side slum. And to get to it from the street we were finding a way through a nearly solid curbside wall of stuffed black garbage sacks. And the play was dreadful, awful. But . . . you could see a pretty good play in a pretty good theater most anywhere. Where else could you see a glorious mess like this?

Ducking across Forty-second Street through a squall of rain, trotting under the canopy into Grand Central Station, down the ramp, across the big marble interior, down a stairway, into a long twisting tunnel, up into an office building lobby, out the doors, and across the street into the building I was heading for, almost bone-dry. Coping. Coping with the place, beating it! Standing in a subway car, hating the graffiti and the word itself, but right there at the door, hip pocket tight against the pole so my wallet couldn’t be yanked, knowing my stop without having to duck and look out the window for the sign, first out of the car and up the steps.

A big rat trotting along a gutter late at night, ignoring me, owning the place. Midnight and the asphalt soft under my shoes because it had been hot for a month, even the white twists of dead vapor rising from the manhole cover looking enervated. Howls and screams late at night in the street somewhere far below my windows, never to be explained. What were such memories? Some kind of perversity? Did I like rats? Couldn’t say, there at my bridge rail. But I thought of the time I’d flown to San Francisco to see it on a one-week vacation during my first year in New York. On the balcony of a college friend’s apartment we sat looking out at that spectacular bay, the day sunny, a little breezy, lots of sailboats. And me nodding, agreeing with what he was telling me: that this was the best place in the United States to live. That the Bay Area was charming, lively yet laid back, and that North Beach was great. That there was plenty to do here, and some very good experimental theater. And that New York was sick, squirming with crime, side by side with truly depraved ostentation; and that it was actually, truly, finished at last. And I nodded and said yeah, and how I envied him his life here. And flew back a day early to the land of the all-night bookstore.

Young in New York, and feeling that you’re beginning to know it fairly well; feeling its pull, its growing hold, finding and appreciating—oh, so much—that can’t be found anywhere else because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. And oh, how smug, yes, but I didn’t care, and standing there on the bridge feeling more knowing about that city than I’d ever really been, enjoying the secret patronizing superiority over everyone else who didn’t know and didn’t understand the infinite variety and excitement of this strange place—I knew I was ready. I wanted back, now; had to see it once again.

The fear, the wanting to stay where it was safe, wasn’t gone but quiescent, ignored and overwhelmed by the pull of wanting to be there one more time. And at my bridge rail I again began the process of return, but with more power; confident and willing it; knowing what I needed to do, and doing it swiftly. I felt it begin, the actual little movement, the queer feeling of the shift into drifting-time. Standing motionless, looking down into the black water, releasing myself from my own hypnosis, I felt the drifting-time ending—and then, abruptly, the sudden, swift, exciting, and unmistakable sense of new place.

I knew where I was, really knew, feeling no surprise as I turned, feeling only a rush of elation at the great sparkling walls of light rising in tiers like a strange mountain range, and glittering to make your heart stop. There it stood, nothing else like it, nothing, nothing, Manhattan Island in the last of the twentieth century.

The sudden sight of other bridges startled me for a beat; I’d forgotten. In my mind I can dance as well as Gene Kelly, but I began walking sedately enough down toward the shining city. Then—I really can sing as well as Gene Kelly—I very softly began my favorite of all the New York songs. “I’ll take Manhattan . . .” and my all-time favorite rhyme, “the Bronx and Staten . . . Island, too.” I was out of words already, but I knew the tune: “Dah, dah, dah, dee . . . dah, dee!” I’d walked onto the East River Bridge, and now, feeling good, I walked down off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Manhattan smelled a little, not much; I’d simply lost my immunity to exhaust fumes. A cab sat waiting, roof light on, just beyond the bridge roadway, I don’t know why. Maybe people did come walking off the bridge at one in the morning, or maybe he didn’t really want a fare. I took the door handle, not opening it: “You free?” And he turned off the roof light, and leaned back a little to catch my destination before he would say he was free. “Plaza Hotel,” I said, getting in, and he surprised me: “Yes, sar,” he said politely, pushing the meter flag down. When we started up and passed under a streetlamp, I saw he was truly black, Jamaican, I think.

I sat leaning out the open cab window a little to look both out and up at the city I was returning to, when the cab slowed to pull in at the Fifth Avenue entrance, and I was pleased to see the old hotel again. I’d been in and out of the Plaza often enough, but in the nineteenth century it was—for me—gone. Not yet built, of course, only the plaza here. Now—for me—here it was back again.

I had my exit planned. Before the cab was fully stopped I was hopping out, beckoning to the cabby: “Come on in!” And you can bet he did, parking brake snarling, ignition off, and out fast and right on my heels.

The man at the desk was tall, lean—an athlete’s build—and remarkably handsome; his nameplate on the desk said, Michael Stumpf, Manager. When I said hello, I included my best smile, and said, “My plane was late, so I’m late too, but I hope you have a room for me.”

“Do you have a reservation?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

His fingers moved through some cards. “A single?” he said deadpan, not a glance at the big cabby just behind me, and I had to smile: he could do “imperturbable” very well.

“Yep.”

“Well,” Mike said, smiling a little too now, winking at the cabby, who grinned—we were a happy bunch all of a sudden—“I can give you a nice single on the Park side.” I didn’t ask the room rate, I wasn’t interested, just said that would be great. He waited while I printed my name on the registration card, then read it upside down. “And how will you be paying for this, Mr. Morley? Check or credit card?”

I was all set for him, my left hand lying on the counter, loosely clenched. “Neither,” I said, “in gold,” opening my hand to let a dozen gold coins spill onto the marble. It was fun, and his eyes widened. Then Mike Stumpf topped me.

He reached out, fingers spreading like a spider’s legs, and drew the scattered coins together, lifting his hand, fingers closing, and the coins followed to rise into a neat stack. Like cutting a deck of cards, he split the stack into two equal smaller stacks side by side, then again drew them up between his fingers, the coins magically interleaving, into a single stack once more. I said, “I’ve tried that all my life. Never did it even once, and never will.”

“Just takes a little practice,” he said easily, and the hotel manager was gone: without a change in a thread of his suit or hair of his head, it was Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford who stood smiling at me now, and I knew this man had played a lot of cards in his time and knew his way around more than this lobby.

I had my story ready; wallet, checks, credit cards stolen at the airport. But I was a coin dealer: gold only, U.S. and Edwardian English coins. Here from Chicago a couple times a year, usually staying here or at the Algonquin. Something that bothers me a little is that I enjoy lying. Once I start, the convincing details flow out effortlessly; I don’t even have to think. Tomorrow, I went on, bringing my folded money belt from my coat pocket and setting it on the counter to let the other coins inside it clink, I’d be selling each of my coins for—I wasn’t sure of this—several hundred dollars apiece. Take as many as you like for security and, please—so this cabdriver doesn’t kill me—advance me a hundred in cash.

G.R.Q. Wallingford Stumpf knew what these coins were, and he simply nipped the top coin off the stack, saying, “One is more than enough,” and now the coin appeared on the back of his hand between knuckle and finger joints. And by slightly moving his fingers as though playing a piano, he made the coin walk back and forth across the backs of his fingers, flip-flopping heads to tails, tails to heads, back and forth so easily. I’d have given him the gold piece to be able to do that. “I’ll give you a receipt for this,” he said, the coin disappearing into his closing palm, “and you can sign for the hundred.”

I felt marvelous signing the receipt. Each of my hard-earned nineteenth-century dollars had become worth about forty here. I had over twenty-five thousand dollars, and from my hundred dollars’ cash I gave the cabby a ten for the six-dollar fare, and added another ten. “That’s for being a good boy.”

“Welcome to New York, boss,” he said. Then Michael Stumpf accepted my invitation, and we went into the Oak Bar for a nightcap.

In my room I turned on the television, clicking slowly through the channels just to enjoy the novelty of it again; what I saw had not improved. Then I got out the Manhattan phone book, looking at the new cover with some interest. Sitting on the bed, the phone book on my lap, I opened it, and found the Danziger listing, a fairly long one. I hesitated, then moved my finger down the column . . . and found it—Danziger, E. E.—and smiled. Should I call him right now? I wanted to, but it was far too late. I’d phone in the morning and invite him to lunch; I’d be glad to see Dr. D, and knew he’d be glad to see me. I was tired, as though I’d traveled for hours, the two drinks I’d had downstairs helping the feeling along. I switched on the air-conditioning, mostly for the pleasure of being able to, and got to bed.

The light out, I waited, knowing sleep would be along quickly. A police car or ambulance howled down in the streets somewhere. Should I have come back? Was it wise? A car drove over a manhole cover, wump-wump, and I smiled, and in my head sang, I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten . . .