From Time to Time

25

AND SO I LOST HIM, RUBE. Well, what did you think! What did you expect? I could have done this, should have done that, you bet. But I’m not supersleuth. Did the best I could, which wasn’t very good, I know, I know. These defensive thoughts moving uselessly through my mind as I stood in my tenth-floor room looking down onto the darkness of Central Park. I was very tired, shucking off my coat, wondering what I ought to feel about my failure. Well, I said to myself, whatever Rube had argued me into, it had never seemed real or possible to me that anything I could do could really and truly prevent an enormous war involving nearly all the world. And I felt no sureness at all that Dr. D wasn’t absolutely right: Don’t ever, ever alter the past . . . or you’ll alter the future in a way or ways you cannot know.

But I did feel stupid, looking down onto the paving and the shining tracks of motionless Fifty-ninth Street. Then, as sometimes happens, another thought came winging along out of nowhere and inserted itself. And I swung around, walked out of my room in my shirtsleeves, and actually trotted down the staircase to the lobby, where the night clerk glanced up at me walking fast across the lobby. The newsstand had closed, but the papers were left out; you dropped your money into an empty cigar box on the counter. There were two copies of the Evening Mail still left.

Back in my room with one of them spread open on the bed, I turned pages, found the Jotta Girl’s Wanamaker ad, and—as well as I could approximate what she had done—carefully tore out a section of the ad, for a woman’s shoe. Glanced at it, then turned it to look at the other side. Out into the hall fast then, and tapped on her door.

She opened it cautiously, saw me, closed the door to remove the chain, then let me in, looking at me as I walked in past her, waiting for me to explain. She’d removed her bedspread, the bed still unopened, so I sat down on the edge of the bed, nodding at the chair near it, expecting her to take it. Instead, she sat down beside me, a little too close, so I lay back, on my side, head propped on elbow. She was having fun tonight, and did the same, and we lay there, faces about three inches apart, while she blinked at me slowly, smiling. It flustered me, as she knew it would, and for something to say, I murmured, “The Jotta Girl.”

“What?”

“It’s what I’ve called you. In my mind. The Jotta Girl. From the song.” I began quietly singing the foolish nonwords that had once so appealed to my five-year-old mind. “Jotta . . . jotta! Jotta, jotta, jink-jink-jing!” She smiled, nodding, and when I continued, “Yes, jotta,” she joined in, and we both sang, “Everywhere you go you hear ’em sing.” Grinning at this two-in-the-morning foolishness, we sang, “Jotta! Oh, jotta! Jotta, jotta, jink-jink-jing!” and ran out of words. Still smiling, I said, “How come you know that?”

“I don’t know: always have. From an old song, isn’t it?”

I nodded, quite slowly. “Yes. A song from the 1920s.” I waited for her reaction, her confusion at knowing a song that wouldn’t be written for years to come. But she didn’t get it, didn’t realize, just lay watching me, waiting.

So I said, “Did you get your shoes?”

“What shoes?”

From my shirt pocket I took the little rectangle of newsprint I’d torn from the Evening Mail, unfolded it, and held it up to show her the ad she’d torn from my first copy of the paper—for a woman’s shoe. “This is the shoe you said you were interested in.” Then I turned my little clipping to show her the other side. “Or was it really this you wanted torn out of my paper so I wouldn’t see it?” Printed on the side now facing her was a column of type headed: Departures. Below that, in small type: Sailing tonight on the Mauretania for Le Havre and Southampton: Colonel and Mrs. William T. Allen, Kenneth Braden and Susan Ferguson and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Ausible, Marguerite Theodosia, Tom Buchanan, Ruth Buchanan, Miss Edna Butler, Major Archibald Butt, aide to the President . . . I said, “You didn’t have to tear this out of my paper; I’d never have noticed it.”

She shrugged. “I had to be sure.” She didn’t move; just kept lying there, head propped on an elbow, waiting, so I said it.

“Dr. D sent you, didn’t he?”

She nodded. “We were afraid you’d remember me: because I was at the Project when you were. But he didn’t have anyone else to send. I remember you at the Project!”

“Yeah, well, sorry. Your hair is different or something.”

“Sure, but still.”

“Well, I’m teddibly, teddibly sorry. I do apologize. He sent you here to sabotage me, didn’t he?”

“I suppose you could say so. Simon, Dr. D knew who Z was the moment you first mentioned him! On the phone that night.”

I nodded.

“Everyone knows who Archibald Butt was! Everyone in the world but you and Rube.”

I nodded again.

“So yes, sure. I was here to keep you apart if I could. Till he sailed. I think Archie was suspicious of you anyway; you came on pretty strong and fast.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have a lot of time.”

She moved her face slightly closer. “So I’m guilty. What are you going to do about it?”

“Oh, I’m not mad. Or even sorry about it. I even think Dr. D may be right.”

“Oh? Then how come—really, Simon, how come you were willing to try such a stupendous thing?”

“As preventing World War One? Oh, just as a favor to a friend.”

We lay looking at each other, lying very close on a bed behind a closed door at two in the morning. Separated by the length of a lifetime from everyone who might care. We lay there looking at each other, and didn’t move. Looked some more, and didn’t move. Then smiled a little, the moment, if there’d ever been one, gone. “You’re going home,” she said. “I can tell. Back to dear old Julia.” And I nodded, and we sat up.

“As soon and as fast as I can. I told Rube I’d report back, and I’ll do it. Then it’s home forever. You?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Wisconsin, isn’t it?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“How do you go?”

“There’s a place beside the East River. Sit there at night when you can’t really see the other shore . . .” I was nodding, and she said, “You?”

“Brooklyn Bridge, if I were going home. But tomorrow—Central Park.”

“So strange. This thing we can do. To be able to do it. I’ve never really gotten used to it.” She leaned close, and I thought she was going to kiss me, just lightly kiss me goodbye, but she only touched my arm for an instant, and I nodded, and we smiled, and I left.

An hour or maybe a little less before sunset next day, I checked out of the hotel, spare clothes left behind for whoever found them, and walked into the Park. From Fifty-ninth Street behind me, as the Plaza’s doors opened and closed, I heard the music of the thé dansant, and the occasional merry-melancholy fish-horn honk of a cab. It wasn’t l’heure bleu, not today; there was a sharpness, a hint of rain in the air. But my bench when I found it was sheltered, and I sat down, and began the relaxation of mind and body, began the strange, actually indescribable mental search and simultaneous renunciation the Project had taught me.

And when presently—dark now, Fifth Avenue streetlamps on—I came around the last turn of the path, the Plaza had a spotlighted fountain twinkling before it, and cars pulling up to and leaving from, and people walking in through and out of, the Fifth Avenue entrance. And all around, and behind it—a great backdrop for it—the hard-glittering towers of Manhattan in the time I’d been born into.