Time and Again (21 page)

At the north end of Union Square, as we crossed the street toward it, what Julia called "a German band" stood playing: five men playing a clarinet, a trumpet, and three brass horns including a slide trombone. They played well, really well, and just as we passed all but the trumpeter paused while he played a series of rising and falling trills that were great. I dropped several coins into the felt hat that lay bottom up at the feet of one of them.

Up ahead I saw a horse edge in to the curb out of the Broadway traffic and begin to drink from a stone? horse-trough. At Broadway and Fifteenth on the square we passed Brentano's Literary Emporium, and I'm not certain of this but I thought a far-off sign read TIFFANY'S. I turned to ask Julia, but she was looking at me curiously, and spoke first.

She said, "How did you know what it was?"

"Know what what was?"

"The Statue of Liberty's arm."

I had no answer for a moment; how could I have known? "I saw a photograph of it."

She didn't doubt me. "Oh? Where?"

Well, where might I have seen it? "In
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
I just didn't realize it was here in New York."

She nodded, then frowned. "A photograph?"

"Yes, of course. I'm certain the woodcut was made directly from a photograph." She nodded, satisfied, and I said, "Look!" not quite sure at what, but changing the subject. Then I saw a little cluster of people standing before a shopwindow and nodded toward them. We walked over; it was a photographer's shop, Sarony's, and they were looking at a display of sepia photographs: actors and actresses in costume, including tights; long-haired, mustached and bearded politicians, writers, poets, Civil War generals. But the little knot of people — some leaving it, others joining it — was staring in at the most prominent part of the display, a long enlarged photograph mounted on a display easel, a vase of daisies standing before it.

It was a familiar face, I was certain I knew it: a bareheaded young man with shoulder-length hair and the beginning of a smile, wearing a long black winter coat with a huge shawllike fur collar and foot-long fur cuffs, holding a pair of white gloves. "Oscar Wilde!" I said, and Julia and one or two other people looked at me pityingly. As we turned away Julia said smugly, "I heard his lecture, you know."

"What lecture?"

"You
are
a goose; I thought everyone knew. His lecture at Chickering Hall a couple of weeks ago."

"Oscar Wilde lectured here? You heard him? You were actually there? What did he say?"

"Oh, his subject was the English Renaissance. I don't suppose I paid attention as closely as I should have; Jake was annoyed. But I was annoyed at
him;
nearly everyone laughed when Mr. Wilde appeared, Jake as loudly as any."

"At what?"

"The way he was dressed: a clawhammer coat, knee breeches, bows on his shoes. And he wore white kid gloves. He has a
very
large face."

"But what did he
say?
You must remember something."

"Well… he was speaking of Byron, Keats, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites. And he said, 'To know nothing about these great men is one of the necessary elements of English education,' and everyone laughed. I believe he liked that, because then he said, 'They had three things which the English public never forgive: youth, power, and enthusiasm,' and there was loud applause. Then he said, 'Satire paid them the homage which mediocrity pays to genius.'»

"You heard him say that?" I grinned, and shook my head. "You actually heard Oscar Wilde say that?"

"Of course," she said absently, without interest; she was staring at an old man standing beside a glass case set on a barrel at the curb.

He had a stubby white beard, a wooden leg, and wore a short-billed officer's cap, the braid turned green. Walking toward him, we could see a ship model behind the glass under full sail in a sea of cloth waves. On top of the case a hand-lettered sign said ALL THE WORK OF A POOR OLD SAILOR.

We stopped to look, and the old man turned to the case, began working a wooden knob in its side, and the ship started to toss, and the waves moved, alternate layers in opposite directions. He stared patiently ahead so as not to seem to beg, but there was a wooden box with a slot beside the sign, and I dropped a quarter into it and felt Julia's arm under mine tug hard. As we turned to walk on, she whispered fiercely, "He is said to own an entire block of fine houses in Brooklyn!"

As though she owned it, Julia showed off to me an enormous block-long store between Ninth and Tenth on Broadway, called A.T. Stewart's, and we stopped so that I could stare. I knew about this store; I knew it was going to survive on into the 1950's as Wanamaker's, but I hadn't realized it was white marble. Stepping closer, I saw that it wasn't marble but cast-iron painted white. In the same block was something called Bunnel's Museum, thick with hand-painted signs: FAT WOMEN, SKELETON, MIDGET! ZULUS! DR. LYNN, THE VIVISECTIONIST! HE CUTS MEN UP! HE MAKES PEOPLE LAUGH! And opposite Stewart's, Jackson's Mourning Store, its windows filled with black clothing, men's, women's, and children's, and including silk hats banded with black crepe that hung down at the backs. A sign in the window said they were OFFERING REDUCED PRICES PREPARATORY TO TAKING STOCK, and I made a small joke about this being a good economical time to die, and Julia looked startled, then laughed as though it were a brand-new kind of joke to her, as maybe it was.

A shabby-looking man walking toward us had a cigar box full of little pellets of some kind, and he started to speak but Julia said no so sharply she cut him off, and we left him standing. He was selling "grease erasers," Julia said, to take spots out of clothes, and they didn't work; she'd bought one for a dime once and tried it. Another man was walking slowly toward us, the fingers of both hands flying. Up closer I saw that he had a little contraption in his hand, a needle threader, and he was threading and rethreading the same needle in endless demonstration. Pinned to both lapels were dozens more of them, and as he walked he said, "Ten cents, ten cents, ten cents," over and again. Not far behind him a Turk in red fez, red gold-trimmed vest, white knee breeches, and curled-up red slippers was selling tonka beans from a tray. Before he reached us, I'd turned suddenly aside, pulling Julia along; in a window before which half a dozen people stood staring, sat a baby — it couldn't have been more than two — suspended in some sort of PATENTED BABY-SWING, according to the signs pasted on the window and on placards behind it. It sat there apathetically, holding a rattle, a living window-display, and it occurred to me that it might be doped up with one of the laudanum preparations I'd seen advertised in
Harper's.

But it was a fine and exciting Ladies' Mile, doped-up baby or not, and before we reached the end of it we passed several more old friends: I remember Revillon Frères just below Ninth Street, and W. J. Sloane between Third and Bleecker. And we watched a lightning calculator with his blackboard, doing any kind of mathematical problem anyone called out to him, with really unbelievable speed. He was a marvel. A cigar box with a few coins in it was at his feet, and I dropped a quarter into it, wondering who he could possibly be — or had been.

At Bleecker Julia stepped to the curb beside a lamppost, out of the way of pedestrians, to point down past Houston to what she said was Prince Street, a couple of blocks off, and a new brick building on the northwest corner. That was Rogers Peet, she said; she'd leave me here to go on back and do her shopping. I wasn't sure whether to shake hands with her or not, but I did, and she gave me her hand. I said, "Julia, it's been one of the best times I ever had in my life."

She smiled at what seemed like an enormous exaggeration, and said she'd enjoyed it, too, smiling beautifully. Something about the moment, a deceptive intimacy, gave me a sudden courage and I said, "Julia, you can't possibly be seriously considering marrying Jake."

She stared. "And why not?"

She seemed genuinely puzzled, yet I couldn't believe in it. "Why… he's far too
old
for you. And too fat, too homely. And just too all around
ridiculous,
Julia!"

After a long pause she said, "It is you who are ridiculous. He is a fine figure of a man. Far from too old. And he will be an excellent provider." She reached out, put a hand on my arm, and smiled. "A woman must consider these things, you goose. Better to be practical than a spinster." She turned quickly and walked off, up Broadway.

I stood watching her: Except for a goodbye later today with whatever excuse I invented, this was the last time I'd see her. Once I'd have thought a girl actually wearing a bustle would look foolish to me, but Julia didn't; she looked graceful, she looked absolutely fine, and I realized that the clothes of all the people passing steadily by, even the shiny silk hats, already looked natural to me.

Up ahead Julia was almost lost; there was a final flash of her purple skirt, then she was gone completely, beyond the intervening pedestrians, and I walked on.

It was a dozen blocks or so to City Hall Park, and I walked, but still I arrived much too early. A little wind had come up, and it was too cold to sit in the park and wait; I couldn't risk Pickering's seeing me waiting here anyway; I'd have to move on. But for a few moments I stood beside the little park looking across it at City Hall and at the Court House behind it, marveling at how very much they looked as I remembered them. As well as I could recall, the entire park looked just as it did in my own time, and I brought out my sketch pad, stepped into the park, and sketched it for reference: City Hall and the Court House, the paths, benches, and winter trees. I stood looking at my sketch for a moment, and it could have been done in the latter half of the twentieth century.

But now I sketched in a few hurrying pedestrians, and then some of the traffic: a carriage, a waiting hack-line of two-wheeled hansoms at the Broadway corner, an enormous green-and-yellow mail truck pulled by four horses on its way to the post office. I looked across the park at Centre Street, and stood remembering how it looked whenever it had been that I'd seen it last — how it was
going
to look, that is; how the traffic there now would be driven from the streets by the automobile that would follow it. And I sketched that into my scene, too: the automobiles, the enormous diesel buses, the huge trucks that were going to choke this and every other New York street; and I faced them all the same way as though they were not only following but driving the horse-drawn traffic off the scene.

I walked on; this was the business and office section of lower Broadway, the area Kate and I had been in, and I crossed the street and walked on along the west wall of the huge, absurd-looking main post office, remembering to look up at the enormous pennant reading POST OFFICE fluttering very stiffly, just now, from a cupola. Just ahead to the south on the other side of Ann Street, I noticed that everyone passing glanced into what looked like a seven-foot-high, extremely narrow sentry box with a gabled roof. It stood at the curb in front of a drugstore in the Herald Building called Hudnut's Pharmacy, and when I passed it I looked in, too. Inside it hung a tremendous thermometer, the biggest I've ever seen, sheltered in the hut from the wind. The temperature was 19 degrees, and I was pleased to know the exact temperature, a lot more interested in the weather somehow than I remembered ever being before.

Here in the daylight I was very much aware of what Kate and I hadn't seen in the dark: the incredible profusion of telegraph wires. Like a rube, I walked along for half a block staring up at a gray winter sky actually darkened, or so it seemed, by literally hundreds and hundreds of black telegraph wires on both sides of the street and running across it in bunches of sometimes several dozen, an astonishing mess. Every few yards wooden telegraph poles sprouted from the walk, some of them — I stopped and counted — with as many as fourteen crossarms loaded with wires, each pole, I noticed, marked with the name of whatever competing company had put it there.

Traffic was very heavy, rumbling and pounding along on the cobbles, and it occurred to me that this wasn't a very broad way; it was a narrow street, actually, which didn't help the congestion any. There were a great many flat-bedded or low-sided drays hauling barrels or boxes. One dray, labeled MARVINS' SAFE CO. carried a crated safe, and I could see it through the slats, brand-new, black and shiny, a freshly painted little scene — cows in a field — on the upper half of its door. As I watched, a boy ran up behind the dray, scaled the low back gate, and sat down astride it, hitching a ride. In the same block a loaded moving van rolled by, an immense red-painted box on wheels, its driver high up on a seat over the rumps of his team. On the side of the van, under the gilt-painted name BUTLER BROTHERS, MOVING, there was a large painted scene in a wildly ornate gold-painted frame. It was no pastoral scene but a cannon-flashing duel between full-rigged ships, labeled in an oval inset at the bottom THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. The Broadway stages, dozens and dozens of them constantly trundling up and down the street, sometimes three or four in a row, were very much like the Fifth Avenue buses only they were painted red, white, and blue, and
they
had scenes, too, painted on the sides; mostly pastoral, and pretty much daubs. But they were all different, and I liked this whole idea of scenic decoration of ordinary things. The twentieth century's diesel monsters, I decided, would be improved by some of the same.