Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  “Let it alone then,” Gwen suggested. “Perhaps it will float back when you're not trying.” She closed the book of photographs and slid it into the shopping bag at her feet. Then she fished out her book of maps and scribbled a few more items. “Now,” she said finally, “this is where it could get exciting. You said that in these snowstorm visions you were following the woman in the direction of Fifth Avenue. You also said that you passed under the darkened terminus. At that point, therefore, you were clearly headed in an easterly direction across—Did you see any open sky above you? Or just tracks and terminal?”

  “No tracks. The whole structure ended there.”

  “Then you were eastbound on Fifty-eighth Street crossing Sixth Avenue. But you also recalled crossing an earlier thoroughfare. The one on which you found her hat. And then when you crossed that street you stumbled on the body of a man named George.”

  “Seventh Avenue.”

  “What else do we know?” She held up the map for him to see. “Working further backward, you said you had turned left onto the sidewalk where you found a hat—a toque, you called it—with a Lord and Taylor label. An impressive bit of detail, by the way. You were sure she'd gone in that direction because you seemed to know that she was trying to reach a particular address. In any case, you knew that she could not have gone in the opposite direction because even you were having difficulty walking into this tremendous gale that was funneling up Seventh Avenue from the south. With the wind behind you, you followed her one block north before turning east. This means that when your dream began, you had to have been standing on the northwest corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue.”

  Corbin glanced at the intersection on the grid where Gwen Leamas was pointing and then looked away. He saw the corner in his mind. And he felt the wind from that night chilling him, draining away all the warmth that had been building within him since he woke up that morning with Gwen at his side.

  “‘What good is this?’' he asked quietly.

  “Come on, Jonathan.” She took his arm. “Let's go find out.”

  Corbin, in the six months since he'd come to New York, could not recall ever passing the intersection of Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. He had not avoided it. It was simply that it stood on the fringe of the midtown area and offered nothing in itself that would have attracted him in that direction. The shops and department stores he used, the expense-account restaurants, the other offices he might visit, and even Grand Central, were all in the core of midtown Manhattan. On Fifty-seventh Street itself, Sixth Avenue was a dividing line between two quite different worlds. East of Sixth Avenue, toward Fifth, was a cross-town boulevard that reminded some visitors of Paris' Rue de la Paix. It preened with some of the most exclusive shopping in the world. There were furriers offering Russian sable coats at six-figure prices, designer-original dress shops, a cluster of art galleries, and dealers in antiques and exotic home furnishings where the cost of the average purchase would feed a Third World village for a year. But in the other direction, toward Seventh Avenue, one saw a contrast that seemed almost deliberate. There, no shops were selling costly indulgences or investments in social standing, no oriflammes of financial achievement. Instead there was a sort of haute monde hippiedom. Most of the shops catered to serious practitioners of the arts. Music and dance in particular. There were stores selling instruments and sheet music, second-floor ballet studios, and lean, lithe, and ascetic women who wore their unpampered hair in tight buns. That street marked the bohemian end of a cultural axis that continued up past Carnegie Hall and curved toward its apogee at Lincoln Center in the West Sixties.

  As Corbin walked with Gwen Leamas up the slight incline of Fifty-seventh Street toward Seventh Avenue a series of odd notions began to pick at him. The first was a certain self-consciousness, as if he were in a place where he conspicuously did not belong. The feeling made no sense to him. He might have understood it if he'd been walking through Harlem, but there was hardly the same ethnic exclusivity to the sidewalk of West Fifty-seventh Street. And although no passerby looked at him with either curiosity or suspicion, the sensation of being an outsider persisted. Even that was not quite right. There were people who thought he did not belong there. That was it. But who those people might be, he had no idea. It seemed as if they were behind him. East of Sixth Avenue. The ones with the money.

  “You're beginning to feel something, aren't you?” Gwen had been watching his brow.

  “Nothing I can grab hold of,” he answered. But Gwen thought she saw a certain defiance in his manner. He'd stiffened a bit and was walking with greater purpose. The umbrella-cane snapped forward.

  “Do you,” he asked finally, “feel any sense of being out of place here? Might anybody put you down, for example, if they knew you chose to spend time in this part of the city?”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head. “The fact is I do spend a fair amount of time here. I've been to Carnegie Hall three or four times, the last for a Bach festival. And I've been to the Russian Tea Room for both lunch and dinner.”

  “What's that?”

  ”A restaurant next to Carnegie Hall.” She pointed up the street. “It caters to the music crowd mostly. At lunch the place maintains a sort of bohemian chic to keep the turtleneck-and-sneaker set feeling at home, but they get concertgoers in the evening. A lot of black tie.”

  “Like Tony Pastor’s?''

  ”I don't know Tony Pastor's.”

  “Or the bar of the Hoffman House. Except that's for men only.”

  “You're joking.”

  Corbin glanced at her blankly.

  “Where,” Gwen asked, “would you find a public bar in this city that excludes women?”

  “Well, it's ...” Corbin stammered, his expression suddenly clouded. He was staring into the distance ahead of them. “It's not a question of exclusion. More a matter of...”

  “Of what, Jonathan?” She tried to follow his eyes.

  “Propriety.” His voice was barely audible.

  The corner was a quarter block ahead of them. Seventh Avenue. That corner. Gwen Leamas tried to make herself light and quiet so as not to disturb whatever was entrancing Jonathan Corbin.

  “Tell me about the Hoffman House,” she said softly.

  ”A hotel. Like many another.”

  “About the Hoffman House bar, then. It caters to gentlemen like yourself?”

  “Not all those seen there are gentlemen. It is a favorite of the Tammany crowd, and of actors and professional athletes. Some good men, at least, among those. And of course every rustic who visits New York feels bound to go there and gape at the painting. No, they are not all gentlemen, dearest. There is more than one patron who might be better for having his ears ...”

  “Go on, Jonathan. His what?”

  Corbin stopped. He halted in mìdstride, swaying, and for a moment Gwen thought he would fall. He bent and picked up a handful of snow, which he pressed hard against his face, sucking in cold air through gloved fingers. Concerned but excited, Gwen pressed him.

  “Might be better for having his what, Jonathan? Don't lose your thought.”

  ”... his ears boxed. God damn!”

  “The man you thrashed. He was in the Hoffman House bar?”

  Corbin nodded, his eyes wide.

  “His name, Jonathan. Quick, before you lose it.”

  “One of Gould's people. Corning. Carney. Something like that.”

  “Then who is Gould?”

  ”I don't know. Jay Gould, I guess. One of the old robber barons.”

  “You guess, you say. A moment ago you would have known.” But Gwen knew she had herself to blame. She'd called him Jonathan. There he was, walking with Margaret again back in that other time and chatting away with all sorts of new clues and she, like a dolt, had to call him two or three times by a name that was almost certain to pull him back out of it. Well, she thought, I won't make that mistake again. What do we suppose Margaret called him? I assume they didn't call each other dearest
all day long. How about my darling? Did they say that then? Of course. As in “Oh, my darling, Clementine.” “In any event,” she told him, “we've made progress. This ghost of yours beat up a man whose name sounds like Corning, who possibly worked for the financier Jay Gould, in the men's bar of a hotel called the Hoffman House.”

  “It's not a men's bar. Just a bar. Women didn't go there.”

  “Whatever.” She took his hand in hers. “Now here's the important part. You saw something while we were walking that made him come out inside you. You were staring up ahead toward the corner where we think your dream starts. Was that it? Was that corner what brought him out?”

  Corbin raised his head and focused on the northwest corner, diagonally across Seventh Avenue from Carnegie Hall. It did nothing to him. The sidewalk there was covered for two hundred feet in either direction by a sheltered walkway of the type that protects pedestrians at construction sites. A Chock Full O' Nuts restaurant on the corner was barely visible under the walkway, and a dozen or so smallish shops on either side. On the Fifty-seventh Street side, he saw a green awning that marked the entrance of the building that housed the restaurant and shops. Only a portion of the awning and its brass posts was visible under the walkway scaffolding. There was writing on it. A street address number. There were also words but they were almost totally obscured. The letters The Ös were all he saw.

  “Urn, darling?” Gwen tugged at his sleeve.

  He did not respond. His eyes, squinting, lifted and re-focused upon the massive brown structure that rose up from the scaffolding. Corbin felt his stomach tighten.

  “Darling, what is happening?”

  He'd seen the building, noticed it, as they walked up the gentle slope of Fifty-seventh Street toward Carnegie Hall. It would have been impossible not to see it. Even then it was familiar. So familiar, he now realized, that it had sent no particular signal to his brain. Like the office building he entered many times each week without really seeing.

  “I'm okay,” he told her, his gaze dropping once again to that green awning.

  “Is it that big brownstone? You know it, don't you?”

  Brownstone. Yes, he nodded. One doesn't usually think of brownstones as being that big but that's what it was. The building was eleven stories high, a fact Corbin knew without counting, but like the old Waldorf-Astoria it seemed half again as large. Each two-paneled window, already oversized, had a third pane above it, a transom made of stained glass. Each stained-glass design was different. The ceilings inside must have been ten, even twelve feet high. On the outside, great ledges, bays, and cornices of stone all contributed to the feeling of immensity. Near the roof line he could see a dull mottled effect on the surface of the outer walls. The stone up there was decomposing under many decades of attack by weather and pollution. Veneer-like slivers had randomly separated and fallen away, requiring the construction of the protective walkway below.

  “Jonathan!” Gwen Leamas turned his face toward her own. “Do you know that building?”

  ”I don't. I think he does.”

  Now Gwen squinted. “The name on the awning starts with the letters Os. Tell me the rest of it.”

  “The Osborne Apartments.”

  “You've seen the building before?”

  ”I guess.”

  “Damnation, Jonathan. Have you or haven't you?”

  ”I don't think so. I've never been over here.”

  “Then how could you know it says ‘The Osborne’?”

  “Maybe it doesn't.”

  “You're being exasperating, Jonathan. Let's go look.”

  Corbin shook his head. “Gwen, I'm not going inside that building.”

  “We'll get just near enough,” she promised, “to read the script on the awning. And perhaps take the teeniest peek through the front door.”

  Corbin turned away, his jaw set.

  Gwen decided not to press it. The relative calm that had sustained him through the day thus far was beginning to wear thin. Twice that she knew of, this ghost of Jonathan's had been in and out and Jonathan seemed well able to deal with it. But this building seemed much closer to home than any of the other stimuli. Very possibly it was home. A single glance into the lobby might bring on a flood of clear memories that would go a long way toward solving the mystery. But it might also, as Jonathan said he feared, fully bring out this strange other person while forever imprisoning Jonathan.

  “Let's cross.” She nudged him toward the curb. ''You can wait outside that Chock Full O' Nuts while I get a closer look.”

  Corbin tensed but allowed himself to be led over a snow mound left by the city's plows. He was not eager to be parked by Gwen on that corner, the corner, of all places, and he wondered whether her choice was deliberate. But a stubbornness that was entirely Jonathan Corbin kept him from yielding fully to the sense of dread he felt.

  Once there, she studied him closely, releasing him and turning away only when he reassured her with a shake of his head. Corbin did, in fact, feel surprisingly at ease, and, realizing that, allowed himself to ponder why. His back was to the large brown building. That could be part of it. Or all of it. Around him, absolutely nothing was familiar. Looking back across at Carnegie Hall, a building that had to be at least as old as the Osborne Apartments, was like seeing it for the first time. It was the first time, of course, for Jonathan Corbin, certainly from this perspective. But if the man inside him had stood upon this corner, if this spot had made an impression so profound that it endured for perhaps a hundred years, Corbin would have expected it to trigger at least an emotion or two. But there was nothing. Only a sense of strangeness.

  Looking south, in the direction from which the wind had come that dark night, he saw only office buildings of stone and glass, most with assorted retail stores at their street levels. The roadway itself, Seventh Avenue, was much wider than the dark street strewn with fallen wires that he saw in the corners of his mind. Impossibly wider. They could hardly have moved all the buildings back. It could not be the same street.

  Toward the east, looking down Fifty-seventh Street toward Sixth Avenue, he again saw nothing at all that jogged his memory. He could envision the Sixth Avenue Elevated and the little signal tower that came before the terminus, but he knew he was creating these from past apparitions. As he stood there, his imagination began to fill in other details as they might have been during his grandfather's time. There would have been trees along the sidewalks. And fashionable town houses of ornate stone. There would have been a church. Down there on the left. It would have a single bell tower and it would be in a park-like setting complete with a churchyard. He could almost see Gwen and himself strolling past it on a quiet Sunday morning. Past it? Why not toward it? Into it. Corbin brushed the detail aside. Perhaps they were headed toward another church farther on. One of the Fifth Avenue churches.

  Corbin turned his head and rubbed his eyes, taking a deep breath to help clear away the minor vision that had taken shape. That was Gwen he was with, he told himself. Long dress or no, it was Gwen. Not a hallucination. It's getting, he thought, to the point where I can't even daydream without wondering where the dreams are coming from. Knock it off, Corbin. He looked to the north. But if he had not, and if he'd strolled partway down Fifty-seventh Street, he would have come upon the remains of the church that he thought his imagination had provided. He would have seen the magnificent facade of the Calvary Baptist Church, carefully torn down some fifty years before and reinstalled as the face and motif of the Salisbury Hotel. He would have recognized it nonetheless. And as for the ghost's religious preference, if Corbin had chosen to establish it, he had now ruled out the Baptist denomination and also the Catholic faith. Admiring the exterior of Saint Patrick's was not the same as suffering to set foot inside. Corbin would have wondered at this obvious prejudice against the Roman church, particularly having attended Notre Dame, but would have recalled upon reflection that prejudice in nineteenth-century America ran deep against the Irish as well. The feelings of Corbin's ghost,
who seemed obviously of an upper class, would have been ambivalent at best. And his church, the one Corbin and Gwen were peacefully ambling toward, might have been the Fifth Avenue Collegiate, which stood almost catty-corner from Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Or it might have been the very fashionable Fifth Avenue Presbyterian which, he would find, still stands or the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church, which also remains although not in its original form thanks to one of the many great fires that regularly gave impetus to the redesign of New York City.

  These thoughts, however, were far from Corbin’s mind as he looked northward along Seventh Avenue toward Central Park. He could not resist dropping his eyes to the spot on the sidewalk where he remembered seeing the woman's hat on that dark night. Emma's, Anna's, Ina's hat. Whatever her name, there was no imagining that hat. Not unless his imagination was so highly developed or his subconscious so teeming with unsuspected information that he could correctly name a style, the toque, and its source, Lord & Taylor's Broadway store when Lord & Taylor doesn't even have a Broadway store that anyone living remembers. But as for the spot where he'd picked up that frozen mass of cloth and feathers, not even the snow and ice looked the same. A block up and across the street he saw the corner where, according to Gwen's map, he had stumbled upon the frozen corpse of the man named George. There was another very old building there too. Talk about ornate stone, Corbin thought, from where he stood it seemed as if every square inch of it was covered with the most intricate gingerbread carvings he'd ever seen on any structure. An utterly unforgettable building once you've seen it. And he had not seen it. Not before today.