Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (12 page)

Using an 1869 stamp he finds in his childhood stamp collection, Jake prepares the letter for delivery and walks to the house from whence the desk had come. He copies down the address and mails the letter at a post office that had been built soon after the Civil War. Like Si Mor-ley in
Time and Again,
Jake Belknap carefully recreates the past in order to transcend time and mail his letter.

The next week, Jake finds himself in the New York Public Library perusing a "big one-volume pictorial history of New York" and sees a photograph of "a street less than a quarter mile from Brock Place... I knew that Helen Worley must often have walked along this very sidewalk." He thinks of Varney Street as he knows it and compares it to Varney Street as pictured in 1881; today, it is "a non-descript joyless street, and it's impossible to believe that there has ever been a tree on its entire length." Jake looks at the picture and thinks about how people in 1881 had time, time "to build huge wide porches on which families sat on summer evenings with palm-leaf fans" (52).

Jake Belknap yearns for a simpler time, as characters in many of Jack Finney's best stories often do, from Tim Ryan in "Manhattan Idyl" to Si Morley in
From Time to Time.
He thinks

Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong lime, and I was filled now with the most desperate yearning to be there, on that peaceful street —to walk off, past the edges of the scene on the printed page before me, into the old and beautiful Brooklyn of long ago (52).

"The Love Letter" is a clear precursor to
Time and Again,
but in this short story the narrator never succeeds in traveling back to the 1880s. Instead, he finds in the old desk a second letter from Helen Worley, replying to his own and full of desire to meet him. Much like the narrator in "Second Chance," Jake thinks, "late at night ... the boundary between here and then wavers" (52). He writes back to Helen, explaining that it is 1959 and, although they can never meet, he has fallen in love with her.

She replies a week later with a photograph of herself. Across the bottom is written the message, "'I will never forget'" (54). Jake knows she will not be able to write to him again, since he has used up all of the drawers in the desk. The story ends as Jake locates Helen's grave, with her message to him engraved on the headstone.

"The Love Letter" is a brilliant story that stands with Finney's best short work. Writing in 1996, Kim Newman called it one of Finney's "perfect short stories" (197), along with "The Third Level" and "Second Chance." The story was adapted for a television movie that aired on February 1, 1998; the tale is greatly expanded and updated, but Finney's themes remain at its core. The movie is well worth watching and garnered good reviews (Steven W. Schuldt called it a "near-classic"), and it is discussed in detail in chapter eighteen.

Jack Finney followed "The Love Letter" with the six-part serial, "The U-19's Last Kill," which began three weeks later in the same magazine (see chapter seven). His final short story to be published in the 1950s was "Take One Rainy Night...," which marked the fourth and last appearance of Ben and Ruth Callander (again with an "e"), who had previously appeared in
Good Housekeeping
in 1955 and 1957. This time, the Callanders and their friends the Howsers play pranks on each other involving a trip to the movies on a night of bad weather.

"The Other Wife" followed in the January 30, 1960 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post;
this story was the basis for the novel,
The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
and will be discussed in chapter ten.

The first of Jack Finney's last ten short stories to be published was "Crazy Sunday." Told in the third person by an unnamed narrator, it features another young New Yorker, Victor Talburt. Talburt is married with a young son; he enjoys his first moments of freedom in years as his wife and child leave for the weekend to visit her mother. On a whim, he takes an overnight flight to Paris, where he roams the city and recalls his time there in the Army. He sees his former girlfriend, Suzanne, but does not approach her, realizing that they have both grown in the five years since they have last seen each other. In a surprising twist for a Jack Finney character, Talburt understands "that his youth wasn't still here waiting to be returned to" (246). He returns home to New York and his family, having bought the French bread his wife had requested.

"Crazy Sunday" is a charming story with a happy protagonist; unlike the main characters in so many of Finney's tales, Victor Talburt is satisfied with his life and with the present and does not try very hard to recapture a time of past happiness.

The same thing cannot be said for the narrator of Finney's next story, "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime." Oscar Manheim is a reporter for the
Register-Mail
who learns of several unusual events in the town of Galesburg, Illinois. The first involves E.V. Marsh, who has changed his mind about building a factory on Broad Street near the city limits. After a meeting with the town leaders, Marsh had walked the streets of Galesburg and liked them; Manheim agrees, recalling how he fell in love with the town the first time he saw it as a child. Manheim remarks that many of the houses "have the half comically ugly, half charming look, made of spaciousness, dignity, foolishness, and conspicuous waste, that belongs to another time" (183).

Marsh tells Manheim that he was nearly run over by a streetcar at the end of his walk. He describes hearing the sound of an old phonograph being wound and seeing the old-fashioned outfit and grooming of the motorman. Yet when he told people about his near miss he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and learned that the streetcar tracks had been torn up in the 1930s. The embarrassment of the incident made him change his mind about building the new factory in Galesburg.

Manheim tells the reader that he never put the unusual details in Marsh's story when he wrote it up for the newspaper; he begins to think of Galesburg as a person, adding that it "laughs at me a little" and "once expected big things of me" (184). He explains that he turned down a scholarship at Harvard to stay in Galesburg and attend Knox College, because he has always been in love with the town.

A second incident related to Manheim involves an old house that was saved from burning to the ground by a horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engine operated by men from the past. The third and final incident described by the narrator involves a man who changed his mind about selling his farm to developers after he received a telephone call on an old, disconnected phone from a boyhood friend who had been killed in France in 1918.

Oscar writes, "I'm glad about that ... because here in Galesburg, and everywhere else, of course, they're trying —endlessly — to destroy the beauty we inherit from the past. They keep trying, and when they succeed, they replace it — not always, but all too often — with drabness and worse." He continues: "we're doing these things, to ourselves ... as though any feeling for beauty or grace or a sense of the past were a kind of sentimental weakness to be jeered down" (190).

Manheim explains the strange events of the story by arguing that "Galesburg's past is fighting back ... when the need becomes desperate enough..." (190). The story ends with another example of the fight, as the past once more penetrates into the present to prevent the destruction of beautiful old trees.

In "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," Jack Finney plays around with the theme of time travel again, with the town where he attended college serving as the traveler. The people in the story do not long for the past; in fact, most of them are trying to eradicate it. Instead, the town itself becomes a force of preservation, perhaps because there are no people left to do the job in its place. This is a cautionary tale, one in which man's insensitivity to aspects of a place and its history eventually causes rebellion by the place itself. Unlike
The Body Snatchers,
where the deterioration of a town is due to alien apathy, this story puts the blame squarely on the residents of Galesburg, Illinois.

"An Old Tune" is a gentle tale of a man who does not escape through time, exactly, but does use an old-fashioned method to float above the times in which he lives. The story begins with the mysterious line, "On the sixth day he was home alone, Charley Burke walked out onto the patio...." Recalling Genesis, Charley is portrayed as godlike, alone on the sixth day. Why is he alone? Has his wife left him? Finney does not tell us. Charley works in San Francisco and "was conscious of the emptiness of the suburban house" (113). Seeing a hawk, he wants to fly, too, and reads an article about the use of hot air balloons in the nineteenth century. "Men understood the things they used then; they were masters of the machines that served them." In contrast, Charley thinks that men of today are "no longer masters of very much at all" (230).

Charley builds a hot air balloon and floats up in it, hanging above Marin County, where Jack Finney also lived. The next night, he is joined by a neighbor, Mrs. Lanidas, and they sing the old tune of the title, "Come, Josephine, in my flying machine," as they see San Quentin Prison and narrowly avoid the Golden Gate Bridge, each of which serves as a setting in novels by Jack Finney. "Charley felt godlike" (233) and bestows blessings on the community below.

The ride over, Charley's wife and daughter return, although we are never told why they were gone or where they went. Charley sees Mrs. Lanidas at a P.T.A. meeting six months later, and they share a secret as the story ends with her saying '"Call me Josephine'" and him whistling the "old, old tune" on his way home (233).

"An Old Tune" is a charming, wistful story that features many of Jack Finney's signature touches but never veers into outright fantasy.

The title characters of "Where the Cluetts Are" find an even more effective way than Charley Burke did to escape into the nineteenth century. The story is told by an architect named Harry, whose clients, the Cluetts, commission him to design and build a house just as it would have been done in the 1880s. As the laborious process goes on, Harry tells Ellie Cluett that "'we're looking at a vanished sight. This is a commonplace sight of a world long gone, and we've reached back and brought it to life again.'" The house is finished and the Cluetts begin living a Victorian lifestyle — guests arrive by carriage and the house is lit by gaslight. "It was a scene lost to the world," Harry thinks, "a glimpse of another time and manner of living" (112).

Eventually, the Cluetts retreat further into the past, having fewer visitors and recalling events from long ago that they should have no way of knowing. By the end of the story, the Cluetts live as if it is the 1880s, "as though the house existed in some other year." Harry concludes that the house is haunted by "its old self" and that its "ghost has captured the Cluetts— rather easily, (or I think they were glad to surrender" (113).

"Where the Cluetts are" recalls "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime" in the way inanimate objects and locations work to recapture the past; this time, it is just one house instead of an entire town.

Fantasy takes over in the weak story, "The Man with the Magic Glasses." In it, a New York office worker named Ted buys a pair of glasses in a joke shop that allow him to see through women's clothes. He ends up in love with frumpy co-worker Freida, who bought a love potion from the same shop. Finney's interest in the nineteenth century peeks through when Ted compares Freida's hair to that worn by "someone in an 1895 out-of-focus tintype" (94) but, other than that, there is little to recommend this story. Jack Finney appears to have realized its flaws as well, because he reworked it considerably before including it in his collection
I Love Galesburg in the Springtime
as "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere." It was reprinted in the collection
About Time
under a third title, "Lunch-Hour Magic."

"Old Enough for Love" followed, in the May 1962 issue of
McCall's.
This is a clever and engaging comedy set in San Francisco, in which a young couple (like the Ryans or the Callandars) know Fred, a much older man who changes his appearance, name, and job in order to date a beautiful young woman. After marrying her, the older man tires of the act, but all is well when he admits the truth to his wife.

Jack Finney's "Hey, Look at Me!" is a ghostly tale about writers and critics. Narrated by Peter Marks, a book editor at a San Francisco newspaper who lives in Mill Valley, it concerns the late Max Kingery, a writer with whom Marks had coffee every day. Max had been a young and serious man who had planned to be a famous writer. He died of pneumonia and nobody noticed. Six months later, he returns, and Peter sees him. Others in town see him, too, and Peter finds evidence in the writer's house that he had been using great effort to try to write but had failed.

Marks surmises that Max was still trying to gain attention as a writer, even after death, like a child shouting '"Hey, look at me!'" by writing his initials on a rock by the side of the road. In the end, Max has the last laugh when he has "MAXWELL KINGERY, AUTHOR" carved in big letters on his own tombstone and the bill is given to Marks, who is, after all, '"just a critic'" (74).

Like Fred, who pretends to be younger in "Old Enough for Love," the title characters in "The Sunny Side of the Street" represent an example of Finney's young, urban marrieds beginning to mature. David and Fran have two children and he ponders their sudden loss of freedom as parents. He and his wife hire a babysitter and set off across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco, where they register under assumed names at a hotel. Despite their seeming freedom, neither can stop thinking about their children, and each secretly calls home to check up on them. They head for home as the story ends, agreeing that children are worth the lack of freedom that they cause.