Time and Again (11 page)

But I looked at none of these. Instead I stared down into the shadows of Central Park, and almost directly ahead the moon shone on the surface of the lake just as it must have, I thought, on another such night when the building I stood in was new. On the curved roads of the park widely spaced streetlamps burned, each with a nimbus of late-at-night mist, and it seemed to me that from here they couldn't look very different, if at all, from the way they had looked long ago.

There was a heavy green window shade, I knew, and in the darkness I pulled it down, then drew the velvet drapes. I did this with each of the other windows, then brought a matchbox from my pocket. I struck a match on the sole of my boot, it spluttered, then caught and burned steadily, the wax running thinly down its stem. Cupping the flame with my other hand, I lifted it to an L-shaped ornamented brass tube projecting from the wall. Fastened to the short arm of the tube was a bracket on which a flowered glass shade was fitted; a key-shaped brass handle projected from the underside of the tube. I turned it, heard the soft hiss of gas, then touched my lighted match to the open end of the tube. A wedge of blue-edged flame popped into existence under the glass shade, and a wavering circle of flowered gray carpet appeared at my feet, then steadied.

I looked at the room and its furnishings for only a moment or so. It was approaching two in the morning, two o'clock in the morning of January 5, 1882, I said to myself, suddenly realizing that the experiment had actually begun. But I was tired, empty of all energy now, and my hand still on the fixture, I turned the light out, then walked down the hall to my bedroom.

7

I can cook fairly well in a top-of-the-stove, smoke-up-the-kitchen style, the way a man who lives alone usually learns. But I'd been doing it for nearly a week now, and my memories of good food were growing dim. Tonight I was having pork chops and a sliced-up potato fried in lard, hoping that for a change they'd both be finished at the same time, but my hopes weren't high. I'm fed up with my own cooking, I thought, as I bungled around the big old kitchen, then I smiled; "fed up" was hardly the phrase.

The boy from Fishborn's Market had delivered the chops that morning at the service door of the apartment. I'd stood at the door in my black, unpressed, cuffless wool pants; wide suspenders; heavy black buttoned shoes; green-and-white-striped shirt with no collar, though both front and back studs were in the neckband; and I wore a double-breasted black vest with braided edges, a heavy gold watch chain stretched across it. I'd stood there handing the boy my pencil-written order for next day's meat and groceries, then I gave him a nickel tip. The nickel had a shield design on one side and a big 5 on the other; the boy was glad to get it, and thanked me nicely. Putting the meat in the icebox, I pictured him out on the street again, climbing up to the seat of his light delivery wagon with the canvas sides that could be rolled up in summer. When it snowed, as it would any day now, I knew he'd switch to the big delivery sled.

The meat, which I laid on top of the ice, was wrapped in coarse butcher's paper tied with string — no gummed-paper tape or cellophane allowed. Someone had forgotten that the first day, but someone else apparently saw to it that they remembered from then on. They remembered about the butter and lard, too; these came wrapped in the same kind of paper, and packed into shallow scoop-shaped trays made of paper-thin wood.

My potatoes were frying away on the big, black coal-burning stove, and I stood watching them, turning them occasionally. I liked it here in the kitchen; it was an enormous room with plenty of space for a big round wooden table and four tall wooden chairs in the center of the room. The stove was big as an office desk, ornamented with nickel-plated castings. A huge wooden cupboard covered an entire wall, floor to ceiling; back of the glass-paned doors stood all the china, glassware, and pots and pans on oilcloth-covered shelves.

It was a fine room, warm and comfortable from the fire, the windows steamed opaque. I turned from stove to cupboard, took half a loaf of bread from the big red bread-box, and cut off three thick slices. I knew I'd eat all of them; this bread was the only thing I ate that still tasted good. Probably all that's keeping me alive, I said to myself silently; I wasn't talking aloud to myself, not yet. It was homemade bread baked by an Irishwoman who sold it door to door, she said.

The chops were nearly done, as far as I could tell by staring at them, and now I ground some coffee in a little hand grinder made of wood and fancily carved. I filled the tin coffeepot and set it on the stove.

I'd gotten into the habit of eating most of my meals in the kitchen; it was easier than carrying food and dishes all over the place. And tonight as usual, when supper was ready, I sat eating and reading the evening paper which was left at the door each night. This was January 10, so I was reading a crisp fresh copy of the
New York Evening Sun
of January 10, 1882. Sitting there reading, eating — the chops were all right though a little dry, but the half-raw potatoes would have been turned down by a starving vulture — I took out my watch and pressed the little stud in its side which released the gold cover that protected its face. It showed just past seven, four minutes faster than the kitchen clock, which hadn't yet struck. I didn't know which was right, and it didn't matter; the evening ahead wasn't too exciting. It was seven o'clock, and would be seven thirty when I finished the dishes. Then I'd play a few games of patience till around nine, go to bed and read this week's copy of
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
which the mailman had delivered in the second afternoon delivery.

A few days later, though, I had company. Once again I was washing dishes after supper, which I didn't really mind once I got started. I'm a daydreaming type, something that's often got me into trouble, starting with kindergarten when I was sent home with a note saying I was "lackadaisical." No one in my family knew what that meant so nothing was done about it, and I've stayed fairly lackadaisical ever since. When I'm doing a routine job that keeps my hands busy, like washing dishes, I slide into a daydream.

Now, as usual during dishwashing time, I let myself slide into one; pretty much the same one every night. What I'd do was picture to myself what was probably going on here and there around town. Down in Central Park, my mind said to itself, if I were to walk into the living room and look out the window, there might be a cabriolet clip-clopping along under the lamps and the bare-branched trees. I didn't actually look out the windows too often, and when I did it was down toward the center of the park late at night or in the very early morning. Because of course this was the twentieth, not the nineteenth century, and the fewer reminders of that the better. So standing at the sink I imagined the man in the cabriolet down in the park at this moment, its top folded back. He was holding the reins in one hand, whip in the other, wrapped to the waist in a light blanket, wearing a black cutaway and a high-crowned derby. And earmuffs? No, it wasn't that cold, but he'd be wearing fur gloves.

Then, in my mind, I watched a man and his wife in a landau heading in the opposite direction, the plate glass glittering each time they passed under a light; they were going somewhere for dinner, I supposed. Helped by Martin Lastvogel's woodcuts, I pictured a liveried servant driving, high on the outside front seat between lighted carriage lamps. The man inside, visible through the oval back window, wore a black coat and a silk hat. His wife wore a round fur cap, and the collar of her coat was fur. Landau and cabriolet passed through a yellow circle of light, and the occupants nodded, the men tipping their hats.

Adelina Patti was singing tonight at the Opera House, according to the
Evening Sun;
right now, I supposed, overalled mustached men were testing the footlights, and in my mind I watched them turn each one on, light the gas, watch for a moment, then turn it off.

At the firehouse half a mile south a man in hip boots was currying the big horses in the stalls at the back of the station, averting his face from the swishing tails, keeping his feet from under the hoofs that occasionally stomped hollowly on the heavy worn planking, leg muscles quivering.

The dishes washed and draining, I lighted a candle in a porcelain holder, turned out the gas jets over the sink and table, and walked down the long hall to the living room, my hand cupped around the flame. There I lighted a single wall jet, and a lamp on a table beside my favorite chair. I glanced cautiously at the windows — it was dark out, there was nothing to be seen — and I sat down in my chair. It was upholstered in plum-colored cloth, with a million tassels hanging from the arms and around the lower edges.

When the doorbell rang, I actually jumped. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would ring it; the boy from the market always knocked. I hadn't known there even was a doorbell, and I almost ran to answer it, afraid something was wrong.

Rube Prien and a black-haired brown-eyed woman stood in the hall smiling at me. He was wearing an ankle-length overcoat with a brown fur collar, and in one hand held a high-crowned derby and something else I couldn't quite make out in the shadows of the hall. The woman with him had on an ankle-length navy-blue coat with a cape attached, and a white scarf tied under her chin. "Hello, Si," Rube said. "We were just passing by and thought we'd stop in for a moment. I'm glad to find you at home."

"Come in, come in!" I was as elated as a kid. "I'm glad you did!"

Rube introduced me to the girl — her first name was May — and I took their things. Rube was carrying a couple of pairs of skates, just blades attached to wood platforms fitted with leather straps. They were going skating in the park, he said; the flag was up and bonfires were lighted. He asked me to come along, but I said no, I didn't skate. I got them some coffee, and when I carried it in, May was sitting at the organ, looking through the sheet music.

The organ was the size and shape of an upright piano, and only a little more ornate than the Taj Mahal. It was of light yellow wood — oak, I think — and was jigsawed, lathed, and carved beyond belief: Apparently an entire family of demented woodcarvers had gone berserk and would have carved it to a mound of chips if they hadn't been forcibly dragged away. May took her coffee; she wore a plain ankle-length wool dress, brown to match her eyes; it had a white collar fastened in front with a little silver brooch; her black hair was parted in the middle and tied up in back in a bun. Rube was sitting in a wooden rocker, and he looked great: His suit had four buttons and high tiny lapels, and he wore a stand-up wing collar and a four-in-hand black tie with a gold stickpin; his shoes were high, black, and buttoned, like mine.

May set her cup down, opened a sheet of music, and played something called "Hide Thou Me," and then "Funiculi, Funicula!" She played pretty well, and Rube and I sat there, smiling faintly, nodding our heads to the music, pretending we liked it. We talked for a few minutes then: about the weather, about a fire yesterday in Ninth Street, about progress of the digging of the Hudson Tunnel. I offered a drink, but Rube said no, it was time to go skating if they were to go at all, and they left. But it was an hour or so — I was so excited by that little visit — before I could make sense out of the book I was trying to read.

Next day that visit caused trouble. After breakfast and the
Times,
I was suddenly fed up with nothing to do but playacting for myself. The whole pretense turned into foolishness, and standing in the living room, a book in my hand that I thought I was about to read, I tossed it to a chair instead. Then I just stood in what had become not clothes but a tiresome costume, fiercely aware of the real New York City all around me. It was full of movies, plays, nightclubs, radio, television, and, above all, people I knew and wanted to be with; and all I had to do to have them was walk out. Planes flew over the city around me; I heard them. And automobiles choked it, and just out of my sight the city rose to the sky in glass, steel, and stone, and the New York of the eighties was dead.

But almost as it began the rebellion was fading and I knew it wasn't going to be hard, in a moment or so, to resume the pretense. I suppose most everyone has had the experience of a vacation in a fairly remote place away from newspapers and television. Under those conditions the reality of the world you've left recedes, and the real world becomes wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

That had been happening here. The idea of turning on a television set was remote. The remembered feeling of how it is to sit at the wheel of a car was a little fuzzed. And the last national and international news I'd heard was long since stale. All the memories of the world I'd left had just perceptibly lost a degree of vigor. And since most of what we do, think, and feel is habit, it wasn't very hard now to blink, look around, then pick up my book and resume reading where I'd stopped last night, back in the mood once again.

Yet as the days passed I didn't even make an attempt, because I knew it would fail. Time flowed by as it does for a convalescent; slowly, effortlessly, without real boredom or restlessness, the hours and days disappearing almost unnoticed like melting ice. The world outside was far gone now, my routine the only reality. Everything about it was consistent with January 15, 16, 17, 18, 19… 1882. And I could almost,
almost,
believe that it was. But outside… From up here Central Park seemed unchanged except for the buildings around it; the view opposite I took from the middle window the first time I was in the apartment. And often now, late at night and at dawn, I stared down at the park trying to achieve the feeling of a nineteenth-century world beyond it. But once when I'd thought I might be succeeding or beginning to, a maroon Mustang with aluminum wheels and a raised rear-end moved across the scene. And I had never, in any case, dared lift my eyes from the old roadways and paths, knowing that the twentieth century, as my picture shows, stood stark and visible all around them. I knew I'd fail if I made the attempt, so I waited.

One afternoon I was reading in the living room, and around four o'clock — the kitchen clock, I thought I remembered, had struck the hour not long before — I looked up from my book; something in the room had changed. I glanced around, but everything seemed the same. Then I looked up, and the ceiling was brighter; the light from outside had altered. Something else had changed, too. The walls of this building were thick; from the outside I never heard any but the loudest sounds, and they were muted. But now I couldn't hear even these; no horns, air brakes, tire squeals. The silence was absolute. Then, far away, a child shouted for joy.

Carrying my book, I walked to a window, and whatever it is that leaps in your chest with excitement sprang up now; there were six inches of new snow, unmarked and sparkling, on every horizontal surface outside, ten billion more fat flakes rushing past my window. Nothing moved on the street below me, and there wasn't a parked car in sight, every one of them moved from the curbs before the snow trapped them. Under my window Central Park West was level with untouched snow, the traffic lights uselessly clicking from green to red, red to green, and across the street Central Park was a delight. There things moved: Little kids in red, blue, brown, green, were running, toddling, and falling down in the snow; they were rolling in it, scooping it up, throwing, and eating it. A few had sleds, and one struggling cluster was rolling a ball of snow already taller than they were.

I'm a nut for lightning and snow-storms, and I stood at the window for what must have been half an hour, watching the big flakes whirl past the glass, watching Central Park turn into an etching as the black branches loaded up with white, watching the humps and depressions that marked paths and streets level off and disappear.