From Time to Time (9 page)

I walked past her; today she stood at the doorway of a little dry goods store not yet open. No one took her fortunes or answers seriously, or wouldn't say so, anyway. The Bird Lady was for fun, and I'd never seen anyone accept an envelope without grinning to show the world they weren't serious. But I believe that underneath the newly evolved reasoning portion of our human minds, the old primitive way by which we actually reach our opinions and decisions still exists powerfully as ever. And no matter what common sense had to say to me about this, I slowed, hesitating, then turned back in the sudden, absolute knowledge that the Bird Lady was, really was, going to give me the proper decision.

I stopped on the walk before her as she smiled; then I pulled out a little handful of change and found a nickel: a nickel with a stars- and-stripes shield on its face and a big V on the reverse, which, I remembered every time I spent one, would one day be valuable. But it was only a commonplace nickel now, and I handed it over. She smiled again, inquiringly, and I said, "A question, please. She moved the stick on which her bird perched to the hack of the box, and waited a moment while I spoke my silent dlnestion: Should I visit my own time, if I can? Then I nodded at the Bird Lady. Her stick lowered, twitched its signal, and the little ro)und yellow head instantly ducked and lifted a tiny envelope in its beak. Smiling, the Bird Lady handed it to me.

I took it, thanking her, and walked on, postponing because my heart was pounding. I made a smile, trying to laugh away my superstitious fear, hut eouldnt. A dozen more yards, then suddenlv I hadl to know, and steppedl out of the pedestrian stream to stand with my back against a cigar store window. Beside me, a nearly life-sized enameled wooden figure of a kilted Scotchman holding out his wooden bundle of painted cigars. The little envelope flap was ungummed, tucked in, and I pulled it out, took the little fold of pinkish-gray paper, and hesitated. I glanced away, at the red cheek of the empty-eyed wooden face beside me. Then I silently spoke the question: Should I go back, if I can? I opened the slip, and it said: Yes.

I believed it. That coarse-flbered slip of cheap paper with its poorly imprinted three letters not quite aligned . . . pressed into this paper long before . . . told me what now I knew I would at least try. And I walked on to the office in the calm of quiet certainty, rolling the little paper to a pebble, then flicking it away to drop into the dirty Broadway gutter of 1886.

At noon I walked down the wooden interior staircase to our cashier's office on the ground floor. He sat behind a black-painted metal grill on a high stool at a high desk where he received and paid out money. When I stopped at his window, he made a quarter-turn to face me, inquiringly. He did, in fact, wear a green eyeshade and black sleeve protectors to the elbows. I knew his name: Ben.

Ben counted out an advance, two days early, of my weekly salary, had me sign for it, then pushed it at me through the little opening-a small stack of bills, the top one a ten on the First National Bank of Galesburg, Illinois. I'd seen Ben count them, and didn't bother to recount, just thanked him, then folded and shoved the bills deep into my pants pocket. These were big hills, seven inches long, a lot of paper, and made a fairly substantial wad, felt like real money.

Down on the street in the little dry goods store, the Bird Lady gone from its doorway, I bought a money belt. The proprietor, a short, bald, eager little European who didn't really speak English yet, spread out a choice of belts on the countertop, some of leather, others of various kinds of cloth, including silk. They were widely used; few men traveled any distance without one. I took one of good lightweight canvas.

Lunch standing up in a saloon just east of Broadway, with half a glass of beer, leaving the rest; too) foamy, the keg newly opened. A walk of a block and a half to my bank, where I withdrew almost half our savings, taking it in gold as many travelers did to save bulk, changing my pay advance to gold, too. Then back to the office to finish out the day, sketching from a photograph, then inking it in-another train wreck, this one near Philadelphia.

CHAPTER 7

AT HOME IN OUR BEDROOM, a little before midnight, I dressed, Julia and I consulting about it in whispers. No overcoat, but a wool suit, we decided; if I needed an overcoat I'd buy a modern one. My suit was okay, I thought: single-breasted, the lapels very small, but acceptable. One button too many, but I could leave my coat open. Winter underwear, and pull-on boots. I owned a derby, a silk topper, a summer straw hat, my brimless winter cap, so we decided on no hat at all. My hair is straight, not quite black, fairly long and thick-thinning a little but hardly noticeable, Julia says. My ties were all wrong, but Julia got a wool scarf from my wardrobe and I put it on under my coat, crossed over my chest, concealing the absence of a tie. I checked my money belt, knowing I was wearing it, but checking anyway.

We had a full-length oval mirror by the window on its stand, and I walked over. Julia lighted a jet on the wall beside it, and we stood studying my costume, Julia in her long blue robe. I was wearing a full beard these days, close-cropped, and as always, examining myself in a mirror, I thought: Not handsome, but not too awful. I tried to picture myself walking along a late-twentiethcentury street, and when Julia said, "Well? I said, "Walk a block in twentieth-century Manhattan and you'll pass plenty who look a lot freakier, and Julia shook her head a little at the thought of the New York I was talking about.

Down in our hallway entrance at eleven-forty by our big standing clock, the hall light very low, as we always left it at night, Julia said quietly, "Now don't worry about us; we'll be fine, and I kissed her goodbye, turned to leave, then swung back to hold and kiss her again. I'd suddenly felt as though I were leaving on a long and dangerous journey. And it was true that where I was going, if I could, was far, far away.

Then I reached for the door handle, and Julia said, "Wait! and half ran a few steps to the big hall closet, felt around in a pocket of her winter coat, then turned to me, smiling, and handed me a copper one-cent piece. For an instant I thought she meant it as a kind of good-luck token; then I remembered. "Thanks, I forgot. And now I did leave, out, down the front steps and into the silent night.

It wasn't too far, and I walked along the dimly lighted, late-at- night, nineteenth-century streets, mx~ boot heels too loud on the sidewalks. Through all of a long crosstown block I passed between two solid rows of brownstone houses, built side by side, walls touching, all identical on both sides of the street. Glancing now and then at a lighted upstairs window, I wondered about it, thinking of the people who lived in these streets now when these houses were new.

I turned a corner, passing a battered wagon parked at the curb, its empty single-horse shafts tipped up to lie angled back across the driver's seat. Near the middle of the block, under the streetlamp, kids had been playing, the stone sidewalks scattered with chalked inscriptions. They didn't say what I thought they would in the time I'd soon be trying to reach. Several simply announced that one first name loved another first name, and the most shocking among them told me only that Mildred stinks. Near the end of the block a man came walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the street. I could see that he was bent over, something big and bulky strapped to his back: a grindstone in a wooden cradle with a foot pedal. He was a street knife-sharpener; why he was out so late, I had no idea.

Then, rounding a corner, I saw it ahead, rising up against a sky luminous from the not-quite-full moon. half a block further on, I stepped from stone walk onto wooden planking-a walkway, gradually ascending. I'd thought the little wooden booth just ahead might he closed, hut it was still open, possibly to he closed in a few minutes, at twelve. Inside the tall booth, as I stopped before the little grilled window, sat a mustached man wearing a derby and smoking a pipe. I slid the one-cent piece, the toll Julia had remembered. across the wooden counter, polished and hollowed from use, and he said, "Thank you , sir. A hundred yards or so further on, still climbing, I passed over the shoreline well below me now, and walked on out onto and up the long slow glorious curve of the new East River Bridge.

Far ahead, the immense, Gothic-arched stone wall of the Brooklyn tower stood black against the lighter dark of the sky, but beside me, widening out into their lovely fanlike pattern, each of the supporting cable strands stood clear and clean, stripes of moonlight. Walking steadily along beside the railing, my steps sounding on the wooden planking, I could see the river far below, blackness sprinkled with yellowed twistings of light. I couldn't really see the water, but in my mind I could-the East River, always the same, opaque and soiled, no color, dull and sluggish. In the distance to the south I could make out a black bulk dimly lighted: a tug or barge.

Near the center of the long, long bridge, the massive supporting cable beside me at something near its lowest point, I sat down on the end of a bench, and turned to look out through the railings at the river. In the day just past, streetcars and other horse-drawn traffic had crossed this bridge endlessly. Pedestrians had moved ceaselessly along this very walkway, each paying his one-penny toll. This is a drawing I'd made for the paper a few months earlier, and while there were fewer boats, it is very much the place I saw now. Looking out at the river, I thought about other times, on nights and evenings, when I'd been here looking at this same river, the same great bridge towers, these very same cables beside me. This place, and all I looked at of its immediate surroundings, existed here now . . . just as they existed decades ahead, a true Gateway, equally a part of both times, belonging in and existing in each. And so, here on my bench in the quiet darkness, I began to think of the time ahead, working to remember, to get the feeling and the sense of the time I wanted to move into.

This was easier than trying to visualize and feel a past I had never seen, as I'd had to do the first time I tried to reach the nineteenth century. Now I knew the future I wanted to rejoin. Had seen and been part of it, knew it was there. From the roadway beside and below my walkway, I heard the steady approaching beat of hooves, then watched a roofed delivery wagon approach, the little flames of its sidelights jiggling, watched the roof slide away under my view, heard the wagon rattle and hoofbeats diminish. Then I sat, seeing nothing really, just staring down at the boards at my feet, and allowing scenes and pictures, memories, of late- twentieth-century New York to form in my mind, regaining the feel of my own time. Not forcing, just allowing it to form. And saw myself on the run through the rain one morning from bus stop to the ad agency where I worked. Which brought my drawing board there to mind, and the familiar view down onto Fifty-fourth Street from the window beside me. Leading to more thoughts of days and people of my time. To my little apartment on Lexington Avenue; small, noisy, and not enough daylight, I remembered too well. To the little lunchroom across the street where I usually had breakfast. And the laundromat. Movies .

It was there, my own time, the feel of it; I hadn't forgotten. And now I began the almost effortless technique I'd learned so well. For many people self-hypnosis is impossible, but for others it isn't hard; it's used effectively for a lot of purposes. And I was far more than ordinarily skilled at it. Sitting here on my bench, entirely relaxed, simply staring, wide-eyed and hardly thinking, out at the river, I used my familiar skill to make this time, my life here in the nineteenth century . . . go still. Go silent, and contract. Go all tiny, and then into motionlessness. And presently I felt the strange indescribable drift, the familiar long moment of limbo between two times.

I stood, turning to face Manhattan, eyes not quite closed but looking down at the darkness of the wooden planks. Even before lifting my eyes I could already see in my mind the great rising, impossibly shining bulk of twentieth-century New York. Then I raised my head fast, eyes blinking to clear them, and stood stupidly bewildered.

I'd failed! There out before me in the moonlight lay the low- roofed old city I'd come from tonight, black dark now except for a speckling of dim pinpricks of light from gas or kerosene lamps, the church spires sharp black against the yellowed sky. And across the low roofs, across the entire width of the island, I saw the reflection of that sky lying on the water of the Hudson. And I felt-elation! I couldn't do it, not anymore, I'd lost the ability! And was free to walk back down into that city, to Julia, Willy, Rover, back into the place and life I loved and wanted to stay in forever.

But didn't. Because I knew. I knew what I'd done. Knew I'd sabotaged my own attempt, thinking of the drabbest aspects of my old life, of things I didn't like, didn't want to return to. And then sat watching myself, watching one part of my mind with another, refusing to let that time take hold, only pretending I'd felt it. I'd willed failure because I didn't want to go, was afraid. Of. . . I didn't know what. Of whatever I might find in the twentieth century. At the Project.