From Time to Time

PROLOGUE

The man at the end of the long table—he wore a trimmed black beard streaked white at the ends of his mouth—looked up at the wall clock: three minutes past seven. “Okay,” he said to the dozen men and women around the table, “we better get started.” But he turned once more to look at the open doorway behind him, and so did everyone else. No one appeared, though, no footsteps approached along the wood-floored hall outside, and he turned back to the group. He was the oldest of them, a trim youthful forty, wearing blue denims and a plaid cotton shirt—and the only full professor. “Audrey, you want to begin?”

“Sure.” She bent up the clasp of a manila envelope on the table beside her purse, and partly pulled out a newspaper folded to quarter size. Only a portion of its masthead was visible, reading, w-York Courier, and one or two people smiled at what they took to be the deliberate drama of this. All were casually dressed, casually seated; aged from twenty-five to forty. This was the little Chemistry Department library, cheerful with shelved books and framed sepia photographs of the old laboratories. It was early evening, September and still light, and here in Durham still warm. Someone had opened the three tall round-topped windows, and they could hear birds wrangling in the campus trees.

“So far my network is only four people,” Audrey said. Her hand, wearing a plain wedding ring, lay on the tabletop, curved forefinger just touching the word Courier. “If you can call that a network. One is my brother-in-law, and I honestly never thought he’d turn up a thing. But he has. A friend of his owns a floor covering store of some kind in Brooklyn, New York. One of his men was working in an old house there, tearing up worn-out kitchen linoleum, and underneath—” She stopped: rapid footsteps sounded woodenly outside, and they all turned to watch the doorway. But the hurrying figure, glancing in at them, moved on by. “Under the linoleum the floor was covered about half an inch thick with newspapers. To cushion it, I suppose. And of course he looked at some of the papers, read the old comics—you know. I envied him. They were all really old, been there for decades. And he kept this one.” She drew the folded newspaper from its envelope, and passed it to the man beside her.

He opened it, spreading it flat on the tabletop, and the others around the table hunched forward to look. The New-York Courier, read the complete masthead, and the man who’d opened it began reading the headline aloud. “ ‘President Urges Trade Recip—’ ”

“No, not the news, the date.”

“Tuesday, February 22, 1916.”

After a moment she said, slightly annoyed and disappointed, “Well, don’t you see? There was no New-York Courier in 1916. It went out of business—I looked this up—on June 8, 1909.”

“Hey,” a woman across the table from her murmured, and someone else said, “Looks like a good one. Let’s see that thing,” and the paper was passed down to him.

“Is that it, Audrey—the date?” said the chairman.

“Yes.”

“Okay, well, it’s a good one. Write it up, will you? Use the new form; we got new ones, we’re getting organized, sort of. Can we keep the paper?”

“Sure.” Her face flushing with pleasure, she ducked to give close attention to bending down the clasp of her envelope.

A woman of thirty, small, with straight dark hair, said, “Dick, I have to leave early; I’ve got a babysitter who can’t stay long. Can I be next?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

She touched a cardboard folder on the table before her. “I got this from my aunt in Newton, Kansas. The local library there has a little history room. History of the town; people give them old photographs, clippings, and so on, and she had one of these photos copied for me.” Opening the folder, she exposed a large, glossy black-and-white photograph. “This was taken in 1947”—she touched the date inscribed in white in a lower corner of the photograph. “It shows the main street. As it was then, of course. It includes the movie theater, and you can read the marquee. I’ll pass this around in a minute, but let me just read it to you first.” From the table she picked up her reading glasses and put them on, bending over the photo, pushing the glasses slightly higher on her nose. “It says, ‘Clark Gable and Mary Astor in Devil’s Judgment, Cartoons, and Pathé News.’ ”

She sat back, snatching her glasses off, sliding the photograph to the man beside her. “I’ve checked every old-movie book in the libraries here; listings of old pictures. And this summer in New York I checked a lot more in the main library there. No such movie is listed. I wrote to the studio, never got an answer, so I phoned, got through to someone eventually who said he’d check it out, and call me back. To my amazement, that’s just what he did. Phoned a couple days later. Very pleasant; had a nice voice. They had no record of any such movie, he said. And—well, that’s my offering.” She glanced around at the others.

The chairman said, “Well, it’s interesting, but we’ve got to be rigorous. The movie listings could be incomplete. Or the studio’s mistaken. Or, nice as your man’s voice was, maybe he didn’t really look that hard. Old pictures that weren’t too popular get forgotten. Lost.”

“But a Clark Gable?”

“I know, but”—he moved a shoulder reluctantly—“we’ve got to be impeccable. It could be only a title change. Released as Devil’s Judgment, then changed to something else. I think they do that.”

“Okay.” She reached across the table as someone returned her picture. “I had some more checking in mind anyway, but I wanted to bring this to the meeting to show I haven’t been loafing all summer.”

“Well, it sounds good. Keep on it, see if you can really pin it down. Steve, you got something?”

“Yeah. Took me all summer.” He was twenty-five, his extremely fine yellow hair thin on top. “Had to write a million letters.” With his knuckle he tapped a little pile of stacked papers. “Want me to read them, or just tell you?”

“Just tell us for now. Can you xerox copies for next time?”

“Sure. Ben Bendix put me in touch with this. Remember Ben? He was in my class. Parapsych degree like me.”

Someone said, “Sure, I remember him.”

“Well, he’s married now, lives in Stockton, California, and he put me in touch with this family. Their name is Weiss; father, mother, two grown daughters. One married, the other divorced and back in Stockton, living with the folks. Well, the divorced one remembers another sister. Sort of.”

“Steve.” The chairman sat shaking his head. “I don’t know about the sort-ofs. Is this one of those little fragments of memory things?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“Well . . . what’s the rest?”

“She thinks the other sister was called Naomi. Or Natalie. Not sure. A year younger, maybe. Thinks she remembers them playing together, when she was around twelve.”

“She says it reminds her of trying to remember a dream?”

“Yep; one of those. Little memories like walking to school together. Dinner with the family. Just stuff like that. And you know the rest: no one else in the family remembers this other sister, there never was another daughter. The divorced daughter actually checked out birth records, and they finally insisted this one cut it out, quit talking about it.” He touched the papers before him. “What I got here is three letters, pretty long, from her; what she remembers, what she doesn’t. And one each from the others. They didn’t want to write at all, but I pestered them into it.”

“I think we have to pass on this, Steve; sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“The vague ones, remember little bits and pieces—what can we do with them? Appreciate the effort, though.”

Footsteps coming fast sounded outside, and two men walked in quickly, the younger one tall and stick-thin in a wrinkled white suit, saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry! We’re late, late, late! But you won’t mind.” He nodded proudly at the other man as they stopped beside the chairman, who was rising to greet them. “My fault,” the other man said; he looked about forty-five, lean in the face, and wore a blue nylon windbreaker over a very clean white T-shirt. “I had to work, so supper was late.”

To the group, the younger man said, “This is Lawrence Braunstein,” and Braunstein said, “Larry.” The younger added, “Larry drove in from Drexel.”

People near the chairman were standing or leaning across the table to shake hands with Braunstein, or smiling and flicking hands in greeting from the other end of the table. They were liking him because he responded so pleasantly, nodding, looking pleased to be here. He was incompletely bald, a thinning, straight stripe of brown hair from forehead to crown.

Someone moved to another chair so that he could sit at the middle of the table, and when he was seated, the chairman said, “Larry, a lot of us know your story from Carl here, though I understand you have an addition to it tonight. But some of us haven’t heard; would you mind telling it over again? From the top?”

“Sure. Okay. And if you want to laugh, folks, go to it. I don’t mind, I’m used to it.”

“We won’t laugh,” the chairman said.

“Well.” Braunstein slid down the zipper of his jacket and sat back, settling himself comfortably, one arm lying relaxed on the tabletop, hand loosely clenched. “There’s not that much to tell; it’s just that I remember Kennedy’s second term.” The group sat quiet and intent, some leaning forward to see him. “I don’t really remember a lot about it, tell you the truth. I vote. Sometimes. But I don’t pay much attention to the politicians. Never did; what’s the use. They’re all—well, you know well’s I do. But I do remember him running again. Watched a little of the convention. It was in Atlanta. Heard some of the campaign speeches. Not much. A little of that goes a long ways, you know?”

Someone said, “Who’d he run against?”

“Dirksen—isn’t that a shout? I remember the commentators, remember Cronkite, saying the Republicans only ran Dirksen because they knew he didn’t have a chance against Kennedy. And they were sure right. Kennedy won forty-nine states and was close in the other; Illinois, or something. And that’s about it. I watched Dirksen concede less than an hour after the polls closed in California. And I remember Kennedy headquarters then, the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, him there at the microphones smiling, everybody yelling, then him lifting his arms, thanking his people, and—you know; all that stuff. Jackie was there, and I think his mother. Don’t remember about Bobby or Edward.”

They sat silent for a moment. Then one of the men said, “I know you’ve already answered this, but do you also remember—”

“That he never had a second term? Sure. Carl asked me that first thing, and sure I remember, just like everyone. He was shot. In Dallas. In . . . 1963? Then they shot Oswald.” He shrugged, apologizing. “I know it don’t make sense, but—I got both memories; what can I tell you?”

“Do you remember where you were when he was shot?”

“No.”

The chairman said, “Okay. And tonight you’ve got something more?”

“Yeah. A couple days after Carl came out and we talked, I remembered something, but I didn’t get around to it for a while. I run the shipping department at Vector over in Drexel, and we been working a lot of overtime, sending out a lot of stuff. But last Sunday I got out my top dresser drawer and set it on the bed.” He smiled around at them, inviting them in on this. “That drawer is a joke at my house, everybody laughs about my top drawer. It’s my junk drawer. Packed full of nothing; you can hardly open it. You know: old ticket stubs from movies, receipts from stores, guarantees from stuff we wore out years ago. And snapshots, stuff I clip out of magazines, a couple of watches’ll never run again, old lenses from glasses after the prescription was changed. My high school graduation picture. And a coonskin tail I had tied to my radiator in high school. Shoelaces, pencils, pens that don’t write, match-books, soap from motels, worn-out flashlight batteries. You name it, it’s all there.

“Well, I dumped that whole drawer right out on the bed, and started putting stuff back. One by one, till I found this.” He opened the fingers of his loosely clenched hand, exposing the palm, and at sight of what lay there people shoved chairs back, legs scraping the wood floor, as they stood up to see. Faceup on his palm lay a flat round object a little larger than a half-dollar. It was white, of plastic or enameled metal. Imprinted on it in blue were the head-and-shoulders photographs of two men, facing each other. The one on the left was a confidently smiling John Kennedy in three-quarters profile; the other, in sharp profile, a serious, almost scowling Estes Kefauver. Above these photos, white letters on a red band that followed the button’s curve read: One Good Term. In a similar band of blue at the bottom of the button: Deserves Another! Directly under the photos in a ribbon shape: Kennedy-Kefauver, ’64.

“A campaign button,” someone said softly, and another voice said, “I’ll be goddamned.” Someone said, “May I?” Braunstein nodded, and the button began moving slowly from hand to hand around the table.

They had coffee, as they usually did, made in a cone-shaped Chemistry Department flask and glass funnel with filter paper. And as they stood around or near the long table or sat on its edge sipping at their Styrofoam cups, the button continued to move from one to another of them, inscription and printed photos held close to the eyes, the little blue union bug on its reverse touched.

“All right,” the chairman said presently, “let’s finish up. Bring your cups to the table if you want.” As they took their seats again, he said, “Mr. Braunstein’s leaving now; he’s got a little drive ahead of him. Any last questions?”

“Yes, please,” said Audrey. “Mr. Braunstein, did you ever run into anyone else who’d had this . . . experience?”

Braunstein, standing with the chairman at the head of the table, nodded. “Yeah, I did once. At my brother’s. He was on a softball team, and I was over to go with him to a game, watch him play. He had another player there, a guy from Chicago originally. My brother had me tell my story, and the guy said yeah, he’d heard that before. In Chicago.”

Steve, the young man with the thinning yellow hair, said, “Well, did it check out the same? I mean about Kefauver and Dirksen. And the convention in Atlanta?”

Braunstein was shaking his head. “I asked him that but he said he didn’t know or didn’t remember or something. Maybe he was just kidding me, you know? ‘What’s so hot about your story? I heard it before!’ But I don’t think so. I think it’s true.”

Their guest left, well thanked, Carl walking out with him. The donated button remained lying on the table, occasionally picked up and examined again during the rest of the meeting. The chairman said, “Okay, we’ve got Teddy Lehmann to hear from, but”—he nodded, smiling, at a young woman in an army lieutenant’s uniform seated near him—“you’re a new member?”

“Yes. I hope so.”

“You are if you want to be. Were you a student here?”

“No, but my husband was. We’re divorced now, but—I got interested. Still am.”

“Good. Well, I’m sure whoever recruited you briefed you. Was it Frank?”

Frank nodded. “How’d you know?”

The chairman said, “Lucky guess,” and several people smiled. To the young woman, he said, “Let me just make sure everything’s been covered. You understand what we’re doing? Right now we’re simply gathering and recording certain incidents. Documenting them as well as we can. We don’t know what they mean yet. If anything. And may never know. We all have our guesses, of course, and it does seem obvious that occasionally two versions of the same stretch of time seem to exist. Or to have existed, one of them replacing the other. Looks that way, I should say. Maybe it’s not what’s happening at all. We’re not even close to formulating a theory yet, we’re just tracking down incidents any way we happen to hear about them. We’re organized to do that, very loosely. And we keep a low profile. We’re as secret as we can reasonably manage without being nutty about it. Each of us is building a little network of friends, relatives, acquaintances—anyone you might think would know, or hear of, or come upon the kind of incident we’re collecting. So start your own network. If you haven’t already. Use your own best judgment about who you should use and who not, that’s about all I can tell you. And explain as little as you think you can get by with. Make it seem as though you’re alone; your own nutty little interest, nothing important. Because above all . . .” He paused for emphasis. “We are not an official part of the Parapsychology Department. Officially they know nothing about us; we’re a private group of . . . hobbyists. We’ve never even met in any of the department’s rooms. I don’t have to tell you why if your husband was a student here. For forty years the department has taken a lot of guff’—his eyes began to narrow—”from academics in other fields, the respectable fields, who wouldn’t know solid evidence or proof—or refuse to know, which is worse—if it came up and bit them in the ass.” He smiled at her and at himself. “Sorry. I’ll wipe the flecks of foam from my lips in a minute. But we’re carefully unofficial. And as secret as we can manage. Okay? Ready for the sacred blood oath?”

The young lieutenant nodded, smiling.

“Then welcome aboard. Ted, I understand you took quite a trip on our behalf this summer. To Arizona?”

“Well, I was in California anyway. On vacation. In L.A., if you can believe it.” Ted, a researcher here, was a handsome man who didn’t seem to know it, his brown hair cut close, nothing made of its curl, his glasses of wire-thin metal, the lenses round as a coin. He looked thirty, and wore a hand calculator in his shirt pocket. “So I took a couple of days, flew over to Phoenix, rented a car, and drove out to this guy’s place.”

“Okay. Tell us about it.”

“My mother heard about this years ago from a friend, a woman her age; they both lived in New York then. I phoned this woman, and got the man’s name—my mother couldn’t remember it. He used to be a lawyer, a really big-time lawyer in New York, partner in a big firm, all that. He’s well remembered, I’ve discovered. Retired now. I tracked him down, which wasn’t hard. Talked to him by phone, and arranged to see him this summer.” Ted reached down beside his chair, brought up a worn black leather briefcase bearing a scuffed Stanford sticker, opened it on the table, and slid out a small, chrome-rimmed, gray plastic recorder. He pushed in a control, and a beadlike bulb turned amber. “I taped what he told me, so you might as well hear it from the source. Just picture us sitting by his pool, a nice Arizona morning, getting hot but very dry. Pleasant. He had cactuses around, here and there, some natural, some in pots. We were in the shade from his house, adobe painted so white it hurt your eyes.

“He’s an old man now, but smart; no trouble imagining him as a damned effective lawyer. Intelligent face. I don’t think it was because I was in Arizona but he really did look—well, not truly like Barry Goldwater, but if someone told you they were maybe cousins you’d believe it. Had most of his hair, snow white, and the same kind of bushy white sideburns. Wore expensive-looking tan linen pants, dark blue shirt. Name is Bertram O. Bush, and he was stretched out in a lounge chair, me in a straight chair where I could manage the recorder. I had it on a glass-top table between us, and we both had coffee, real big cups. It’s a nice place, some twenty-odd miles out of Phoenix. He and his wife retired there, but now he’s a widower. Lives alone, but he has grown children with families and two of them live near Phoenix. The other in California. He seems to see them fairly often. And did I say he has money? Well, he obviously has; it’s a nice place.

“We got our preliminary chitchat out of the way, he said it was okay to record, and here’s what I got. Nice and clear; I’m a master with these things.” He pushed another control, and after a second or two his own voice came from the machine. “Okay, Mr. Bush, tell us about it if you will. Though you must be tired of telling it.”

“Well, I used to be, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve told it.” This voice was deep, measured, assured; did not sound old. “When I was a kid in grade school and told this, I got hooted and jeered at, naturally, boys being the sensitive considerate creatures they are. Which I didn’t mind; I hooted right back, my insults often superior to theirs. And it was somewhat the same in college. Mostly people assumed I’d made this up, but at least I got credit for being mildly imaginative and entertaining, a clever fellow. But always some people listened thoughtfully. And a few were impressed. When one of these was a girl, I sometimes found that her interest and attention transferred to me, and I’m afraid I sometimes used my story for the wrong reasons, though I feel no shame. But after I began practicing law in New York, and particularly when I understood the solid possibility that I might someday become a partner of the firm in which eventually I did just that, I stopped telling this story. It was harmful now, made me seem odd and eccentric. So I shut up about it, except very occasionally to someone I knew would be interested and could be trusted. Doesn’t matter now, of course. I’m retired. Old.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“None of that. And if you dare even pronounce the term ‘senior citizen,’ I’ll demonstrate that I’m capable of throwing you into this pool. Headfirst. And hold you under. I am old. I was born near the turn of the century, so I’ve never had any trouble remembering my age.

“Anyway, when I was a boy we lived in New York. On Madison Avenue. We had a house—long gone—a four-story brownstone. My father, mother, two sisters, and me. And a dog actually named Fido. Plus several servants; my father was a successful marine-insurance broker, and we were well-off. Every morning our whole family breakfasted together, by paternal fiat, in the dining room. And one spring morning, a Wednesday, I remember, my father asked me whether I’d like to skip school that day. Well, I was twelve years old, and I acknowledged that just possibly I might; but why? Well, there was a ship coming in, he said, a liner, and it had occurred to him that I might like to see her come in, from his office. He knew very well I would. I was wild about the big liners in the same way, I suppose, that my grand- and great-grandchildren are about planes today. Although come to think of it, I don’t believe they really are. They seem to take everything in stride, pretty hard to impress. They know more than I did when I was twenty years old. And some things, I’m sure, that I don’t know yet.

“But I loved the big liners. Thought about them, read about them, looked at their pictures and drew my own. And would have given anything I had or ever would have to sail on one. As we all did four or five years later. To Europe on the Leviathan. That was the old Vaterland, as you know. You do know, of course?”

“Sure, who doesn’t?”

The old man laughed. “In the years since, I’ve sailed on the Mauretania. More than once. The old Mauretania, of course. And the Normandie, the Laurentic, the Isle de France, God bless her, and the Queen Mary many times. Wonderful ship, the Mary, one of the great ones. Compares with even the Mauretania, and I don’t like it that she’s tied up and engineless in southern California, where she doesn’t belong and never did. I suppose we should be grateful, though, that she still exists. None of the others do. All scrapped the moment their profitable days were done. Suppose we’d saved them? Had them all lined up in Southampton from the Kaiser Wilhelm on, say, right on through to the Mary. Be wonderful, wouldn’t it? Then someday finally we’d add the newest and last, the Queen Elizabeth, Second: the QE Two. Which I’m happy to say is fully in the grand tradition. Modern, yes. As she should be. But a most worthy successor to her ancestors. You must sail on her, my boy, if you never have.”

“Can’t afford it.”

“Stow away then, but do it. Because when she’s gone, when they scrap the QE Two as of course they will, picking her bones and selling the skeleton for the last dime of profit, there’ll be no more Atlantic liners. Not ever. She’s your last chance to know one of man’s most pleasurable experiences, including sex, though a young man like you should be able to combine the two and avoid the comparison: I can assure you it makes for a wonderful crossing. Sail on the QE Two while you still can; I insist. Where was I?”

“Your father.”

“Yes. My father. Of course he knew what my response to his invitation would be, but he was aware, he said, of my burning thirst for knowledge; maybe, after all, I’d prefer to go to school? He’d understand if I did. My father liked to tease us a little, and we enjoyed it, at least I did.

“We went downtown to his office after breakfast, at Battery Place and West Street. The Whitehall Building, new then; it had a good view of New York harbor, and the old Battery. I wore corduroy knickerbockers, long black knit stockings, a kind of Norfolk jacket, and a cloth cap with a peak. All boys did; it was compulsory. We took the El downtown to his office, which had a huge rectangular window overlooking the entire harbor and bay as far as the eye could see. He had a big leather-bound brass telescope on a wooden tripod. I expect every office on that side of the building had one.

“The ship was already visible when we arrived, still far out, hardly more than a speck, but my father found it in the telescope, focused carefully, then turned it over to me, and I stood hardly breathing so as not to jar the telescope, watching that ship grow in the tight little circle of my vision. She was coming straight on, with a bit of white bow wave, and her stacks smoking; I could see that almost tangible blackness curling straight back. She was coal-fueled, and I expect she had a full head of steam. She grew, filling the circle, then expanding beyond it, and I stood erect and found her again with my own vision, shrunk back down in size. But once more she grew, very fast, and then I could see the colors of the pennants strung in her rigging for the occasion. Fireboats appeared, moving out to meet her; then they swung around to escort her in, their long brass hose tips pointing up, pumping great pluming jets of white water and spray. First time I’d ever seen that, though not the last.

“The tugs reached her next, as I recall, and now—she seemed very close—she turned to port, and I saw the full astounding length of her, the great stacks streaming smoke straight out over the port side. They all had four stacks, you know, and I still think it’s the way a liner should be. It’s the only thing wrong with the QE Two; she ought to have four stacks as God intended. Just as He meant automobiles to have running boards, and airplanes two wings. Right, my boy? You agree, of course.”

“Of course,” said Ted’s voice. “It’s what I keep saying all the time.”

“I’m sure you do, but you must try not to be boring about it; you’re not old enough. She turned, as I say, I saw the magnificent length of her, the sun lighting those millions of portholes, and of course in just that moment she sounded her horn. I saw the steam puff first, a sudden whiteness, and then oh, the glory of that deep sound. All the lost sounds: wagon wheels, ships’ steam horns, the whistle of steam locomotives. Yes indeed. God also meant locomotives to run only by steam.”

“I know. Diesels are the devil’s work.”

“You’re right! You’re right! You know, you don’t look eighty at all.”

The chairman laughed. “You two got along, didn’t you?”

Ted poked a control, stopping the tape. “Yeah, we did. ’Course he’s a lawyer, a pro; instinctively wants you on his side, and knows how to get you there.”

Ted started the machine again, the reels turned for a moment, then the old man’s recorded voice continued: “The sound, the cry of that ship, actually rattled the windows, and I do remember clearly that I could feel the vibration of it in my chest. So deep. Such a low, rough, growling, utterly thrilling sound.

“And then very quickly, the tugs assembling around her, little blobs of color fussing at her waterline, their stacks blowing black, she was gone, cut from our view by buildings, but then I learned that the best was yet to come. My father had passes, he announced now, which would admit us to her dock, on the Hudson; she was a White Star liner. And if I liked, we could go watch her dock, unless—and some more nonsense then about my deep love of school and learning.

“The only thing that might conceivably have made that day more wonderful for me would have been to find that down in the street at the cab rank one of the waiting cabs was an automobile. But this morning there were only two waiting cabs, both horse-drawn, and we climbed in, and moved up Broadway, through Washington Square, then over on Fourteenth, I think, and along the Hudson on West Street, to the docks.

“We walked down the stairs onto the pier, a partly roofed but otherwise open platform of thick splintery planking. It may be there yet for all I know, a long shedlike structure without sides, and our ship was already in sight, out there on the river. She was already turning toward the pier, in fact. For a moment or so as she made the quarter-turn, the black smoke boiled out—I loved this—more thickly than ever, and I stood staring across the water at her, truly spellbound. Very suddenly the smoke abated, almost stopping, as the tugs took over the work of moving her. Then, their own stacks pouring black, they brought her in, quite slowly, slowing even more as they neared, heading straight for the pier as it seemed to me. I stood watching, staring rather, and could not believe that anything could grow so large. The tugs turned her very slightly, and now I saw her not quite head-on. Saw her stacks now, painted beige, as I recall, with a black band at the tops. Four stacks, almost merged, like the pickets in a fence viewed at an angle. She grew taller. And taller. More and more enormous as she came at us, almost frighteningly, until—alongside the dock now, impossibly only a few feet away—she had become so tall, her sides swelling outward so far, that I could no longer see her superstructure, and I stood there stunned at the enormity of this thing.

“The tug far out at her stern suddenly boiled water, immense churning pools of greasy gray bubbles. At her other side tugs shoved her sideways with a sudden rumbling sound, and the dirty water separating ship from dock shrank to a yard, a foot, to inches, and then—very slightly, gently as an elephant accepting a peanut—she touched, and through the soles of my shoes I felt the movement of the entire dock, and heard the vast creak and groan of its planks and nails, and understood the enormousness of the weight that had just barely nudged us.

“Now the ship was still, immense hawsers flying out from openings in her sides to drop, uncoiling, and be snubbed tight to the bollards by waiting men. A gangplank, slanting up toward the black hull, was being wheeled to her almost at a run, and before it could even be fully secured a swarm of uniformed porters in white jackets and black-visored caps were running up it.

“Almost immediately then, hardly a minute’s delay, down came the first-class passengers, the porters carrying hand luggage spotted with colored stickers bearing the names of foreign hotels. Don’t think of these people moving down that gangplank as dressed in ‘casual’ clothes, ‘sport’ clothes, like tourists from Hawaii with paper leis around their necks. There were no casual or sport clothes, unless you count the white flannels in which men played tennis. These people, many smiling, some haughty, coming down from that great ship, were dressed for arrival in New York, the City, the metropolis. And the women wore hats. Huge wheels some of those hats, the brims wide as small umbrellas; I mean it. Others had jeweled turbans of intricately folded cloth, feathered, and worn down to the eyebrows. And dresses to just above the ankles, and sort of . . . curved in at the hem. Hobble skirts, yes. They wore or carried coats, some of fur or fur-trimmed. These women, believe me, were dressed. Dressed, I suppose, for the uplifted eyes of all of us down there on the dock, and for the reporters with press passes in their hatbands who had boarded from the pilot ship to interview some of them.

“The men wore suits, mostly. With vests and ties. A few wore black frock coats with gray, striped trousers, and stiff wing collars. A very few wore tall shiny silk hats—bankers and Wall Street people, I suppose, going straight to their offices. My father wore a felt hat, as most younger men did.

“As these godlike passengers stepped onto the dock, they were met, and hugged, and kissed. They were presented with bouquets, and with telegrams and cablegrams by uniformed boys. Nearby, waiting and smiling, stood clusters of servants, the women not quite in uniform but you could tell who was maid or nanny. The chauffeurs, some carrying folded lap robes like badges of office, wore livery and polished leather puttees. Out front, parked directly beside the dock entrance—we’d passed them coming in—stood a line of limousines. I knew every automobile made by sight, and these were Isotta-Fraschinis, Pierce-Arrows, a Stutz roadster, and so on.

“The heavier luggage of these people was coming down from the side of the ship on a kind of plank of rollers, sweating men in porters’ smocks heaving them off at the end. Most of these were huge steamer trunks lettered with names or initials followed by the name of the city: New York, Wien, Constantinople, London.

“Not until the first-class passengers, except for stragglers, were gone from the pier to customs were other gangplanks wheeled up for the second-class, third-class, and steerage passengers. Down they came now, and I remember them as simply uninteresting. They walked down their sloping gangplanks dressed like ordinary people you’d see on the streets. And not talking, almost as though they didn’t have the right. A few waved a little to waiting friends, smiling but not calling down to them. And for me it had all turned . . . drab. These people, I truly believe, knew their places in society. And without resentment. And little snob that I suppose I was then, though I did not remain one, I had no interest in them.

“Yet I didn’t want to leave. Couldn’t. And my father indulged me. I walked on toward the prow—wandered, really, sometimes stopping to lift my chin and look up at that immensity of curved black plating all riveted together to form a ship. Along this portion of the dock were fewer and fewer people, and as I approached the very nose of the ship, there were no others. But far up, several officers in their visored caps leaned on the rail looking down. I wanted to wave but didn’t for fear they might simply stare and not return it.

“Then I stood directly opposite the prow just looking at the very end of the great ship, the prow a perfectly vertical knife edge as ships were then. Far overhead, just short of the top of the hull and well back from the prow, hung the white block letters that spelled out the name of this great new ship. They were a long way off, those white letters, and I could feel the weight of my own head tipped far back to look up at them. But I could see them perfectly plainly. Read them with no difficulty. I can see them in my mind right now, seven big white letters standing absolutely plain and clear, and of course you know what they spelled: It’s why you’re here.”

“Yes, but . . . say it.”

“The white letters high on the painted black hull of that ship read Titanic, as I’ve told people for the rest of my life. And that’s that. Feel free to ask whatever you like, though you’ll surprise me if you have a question I haven’t often been asked before.”

“Could this have been a . . . particularly vivid dream? One of those dreams so real it comes to seem like an actual memory?”

“A dream, could it have been a dream? Of course you must ask. But this is my answer: Occasionally you yourself have had a dream—everyone has—that was astonishingly real. Nothing fantastic about it. And that stayed in your mind afterward, clean and clear. Perhaps never forgotten.”

“Yes.”

“But this is also true, always. You know that nevertheless it was a dream. No one ever mistakes a dream for reality. The experience I’ve described to you—happened.”

“Did you also know that the Titanic never reached port?”

“Yes, I remember hearing the news as a boy. The Titanic had struck an iceberg. On her maiden voyage. And sank, drowning two thirds of her passengers and crew. Oh yes, I remember that. I can’t, of course, explain this rationally, but . . . I remember what I remember: that I also saw the Titanic dock.”

A silence through several seconds, the tape hiss continuing. “One last question. Have you ever run into anyone else—”

“Twice. One yes; the other maybe.”

“And—?”

“Both heard my story. A woman, middle-aged at the time, who said yes, she’d always had the same two memories. I believed her. Another, a man of my age, said the same thing. I simply wasn’t sure about him. Maybe so.”

Ted pushed a control. “The tape ran out. There’s a little more on the other side, but you’ve heard it all actually. He does go on a bit.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a good one. It’s a good one. Do us a report, Ted, and—do we get the tape?”

“Oh, sure, that’s what it’s for.”

“Okay. Well, it’s a little late, folks. I had an interim report, but it’ll hold till next time. It’s a little more on the old book, is all: the Turnbull biography. For those who came in late last time or fell asleep, that’s Amos Turnbull, friend of Jefferson and Franklin, member of the Continental Congress. But mentioned nowhere else, and no other copy of my book known by anyone. All my interim really says, though, is that I spent a lot of hours this summer reading Colonial newspapers on microfilm. Which will either drive you blind or crazy; it’s a photo finish. And found nothing, not a mention of Amos. Oh, Irv—you had some film?”

“Yeah, but no projector: this is thirty-five-millimeter. Thought I had a projector borrowed, but it fell through. I’ve got about a hundred feet of old black-and-white.”

“Showing?”

“A couple of blocks of a street in Paris; 1920, ’21, along in there. Very bright and sharp. Shops, people walking around, nothing much. But at the end of this particular street you should see the Eiffel Tower.”

“And it’s not there?”

“Right.”

“Okay, like to see that. Next time?”

“Count on it.”

“All right, then, it’s a wrap. See you all in a month, those I don’t see tomorrow; Audrey will send out notices. Anybody need a ride?”

No one did, and chattering—less of the meeting than of work, classes, children, clothes, recent vacations—they began gathering belongings from the tabletop, shoving back chairs. The bearded chairman stood by the door speaking good-nights as they left. When the last of them had passed through the door, the sound of footsteps in the wood-floored hallway diminishing, the nighttime silence beginning, he glanced at the campaign button in his hand, then flicked down the light switch and pulled the door closed, standing in the hall listening till he heard the lock click.