Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  After waiting several days, and having seen the hurt in Margaret's eyes, Tilden met first with his attorney, Mr. Andrew Smithberg, to inquire as to hastening the availability of the Greenwich house and also as to the progress Mr. Smithberg was making in the construction of a fictitious personal history for Margaret. Tilden had confided in the attorney because he reasoned that if Margaret were to live under an assumed name, she ought to be armed with satisfactory answers to any questions that might normally arise, whether they be casual or official. Smithberg assured Tilden that he was diligently at work on both projects and hoped to have a resolution shortly. Tilden did not bother questioning the Beckwith & Company lawyer regarding any legal recourse against Colonel Mann. There had been no provable libel against him personally, not even in Mann's use of the word suspicious in reference to Ella's death. And the “soiled dove” euphemism as it applied to Margaret was not one he chose to challenge in open court.

  Upon completing his interview with Mr. Smithberg, Tilden left his office early and walked to Park Row,where he waited on the sidewalk outside the editorial offices of Town Topics. It was useless, he knew, to request an appointment with Colonel Mann and even more so to attempt a confrontation in Mann's office. Prudence had long ago dictated to the publisher that he keep his stout office door locked at all times and that all visitors be well screened. A male receptionist behind a barred bank teller's desk kept an updated list naming a hundred or more possible visitors of hostile disposition. A silent alarm would be touched if any of these were to appear. Colonel Mann's hack—he owned no carriage—was met by a guard each morning, and he was escorted to it at the curb each evening. Tilden's intention was to loiter until the colonel left for the day and follow the hack on foot until an opportunity arose to leap aboard. He waited less than an hour before the genial snow-bearded man appeared, paused on the sidewalk to admire a passing babe in a wicker perambulator, gave a cube of sugar to the hack driver's horse and bade good evening to his guard. Tilden mingled with the homebound crowd at the first uptown intersection. As the hack slowed to allow their crossing, Tilden slipped to its blind side and was aboard in a single leap.

  “Hey,” the driver snapped. “What do you think you're up to?”

  “It's all right.” The colonel raised a hand, noting no threat of immediate harm in Tilden’s manner. Tilden, in fact, had clasped his hands over his knees and was affecting a posture of carefree relaxation. “My young friend will not be staying long.” Colonel Mann met Tilden’s eyes and directed them to the small two-shot Derringer that peeked from beneath his lap robe.

  “Don't be ridiculous,” Tilden whispered, his tone good-natured. “The thing isn't even cocked and for heaven's sake don't do it now. I'm here to talk business.”

  “Hmmph !'' The older man looked down at the weapon. “Another day, another lesson learned. You're quite sure I'll have no occasion for this?”

  “The fact is I'd break your arm, you rascal, if I thought it would help. But I know it would not. Now, how can we reach an accommodation?”

  “That's a problem, sir.” He sighed. “Care for some rock candy?”

  “Tell me the problem, Colonel.”

  “'I would very much like you to pay me the compliment of buying a lifetime subscription. But the dilemma I find myself in is that the person supplying the information I've used is probably more interested in having it in than you are in having it out.”

  “Ansel Carling?” Tilden held his smile.

  “Oh, goodness no,” the colonel laughed. “Oh, dear me. That's a good one. Ansel Carling, indeed.”

  Tilden stared at him.

  ”I am sorry, Mr. Beckwith. It's rude of me. I know you don't get the joke. The person I refer to is Mr. Gould, of course.”

  “You admit that?”

  “Yes, indeed. Mr. Gould himself insisted that there be no duplicity. He divined, you see, that you would be paying me a visit, although he did not predict it in this fashion. Dear me. I hope others won't be making a habit of leaping into my cab.”

  “Did Mr. Gould predict the outcome of this meeting?” Tilden asked.

  Colonel Mann shook his head. ”‘He suggested that I tell you as soon as possible, so that no unpleasantness happens first, that it is he whom you must ask for an accommodation. I am asked to remind you that Mr. Gould cherishes nothing more than the hope that you will be his friend.”

  “And my alternative is to read about myself in your newspaper.”

  “You have two weeks' grace, young Tilden, before another eye is cast upon your activities.”

  ”I see.” Tilden rubbed his hands. “Can you and I make some arrangement in the meantime that would restrict your reportage to me exclusively?”

  “I'm afraid not. Mr. Gould was quite specific. I do have something else to sell you, however. It is beyond the scope of my understanding with Gould, and you are sure to find it useful. The price is two thousand.”

  “‘Might I have some clue as to the subject matter?’'

  “Ansel Carling.”

  Tilden snorted. “Nothing that man might have done would surprise anyone.”

  “It's worth the money, I promise. It will surely give you a card to play against Gould.”

  Tilden thought for a long moment, finally concluding that one card might be better than none at all.

  “Two thousand, you say?”

  “And a bargain.”

  “Done. Unless it's a thing I already know, or unless it's something I find to be false, you will have your money by close of business tomorrow.”

  “He's a Jew.”

  ”I beg your pardon?”

  “He's a Jew. Named Asa Koenig. Never been closer to India than an inkwell. He grew up in England, true enough, but as the son of a valet who came from Germany with one of Prince Albert's retainers. Arrested for forgery and deported to Botany Bay. Learned his railroading there, first in a work gang and then apprenticed to the surveyors. Letters of recommendation are forgeries, of course.” The colonel looked with satisfaction at the dazed expression on Tilden Beckwith's face. “It's a honey, isn't it.”

  “Does Jay Gould know this?”

  “He's known for some time,” Mann said cheerfully. “It was your doing, indirectly. Back when everyone was talking about what a coward you made Carling to be, and talking about Carling himself, the talk eventually reached another Englishman who knew the family Carling was supposed to come from except this fellow said the only Ansel Carling he could recall went to India sure enough but he died there of the cholera. That got back to Gould and Gould commenced checking up and in time he found out the truth. He never confronted Carling, or Koenig, with it, just got him far away out of his sight.”

  “What use is this to me?” Tilden asked coldly.

  “Why, for trading, of course.”

  ‘‘Trading?”

  “Gould is not a man who wants it known he's been fooled. He's also a man who's gone out of his way to convince people with whom he does business that he's not a Jew himself.”

  “You are suggesting that I blackmail him. I will keep quiet about this if he will keep quiet about me. May I ask why an accomplished blackmailer such as yourself has not taken more direct advantage of this intelligence?’'

  “No one gets his name in Jay Gould's book if he can help it.”

  The hack turned left onto Canal Street. Ahead of him, Tilden saw the Sixth Avenue Elevated, which could have him at the Osborne in twenty-five minutes or the Claremont in forty-five. He had not planned on seeing Margaret tonight. Charlotte, that is.. It would be well if he got into the habit of saying Charlotte, although the name had not the same music for him that it had for her. He had intended to see to certain affairs at home and to dutifully look in upon the child and his nurse. But now that prospect seemed less attractive than ever. Bad enough that he was raising the son of Ansel Carling, the sneak and coward. It now seems, given that this other devil's story is true, that he has given his name to the son of a confidence man and convict. The business of his
being a Jew meant little to Tilden. The Jews in his acquaintance shared a sense of tradition and of family and of industry. Would that Carling, or Koenig, shared any of these qualities. He was more like an Irish Catholic.

  “I'll get off here,” Tilden said.

  ”I can expect your draft tomorrow?”

  Tilden nodded, stepping to the street at the foot of the station stairs. ”I will pray, Colonel Mann, that a special corner of hell is being prepared for you. Good day, sir.”

  At Central Park, he found a flower stall where he bought a bouquet of yellow asters. With these he boarded the Ninth Avenue train and carried them to the warm and welcome smile of Margaret Barrie. He spent the night in her arms.

  It was scarcely a week later that Tilden’ s lawyer, Mr. Smithberg, in a state of considerable excitement, tracked Tilden down at the Athletic Club. Taking Tilden to a private room, he spread out several papers, one of which was an issue of the New York Times, then six days old. Its masthead date was October 11. He directed Tilden’s attention to an item on the first page which described a terrible train wreck that had occurred on the Lehigh Valley Railroad at a place called Mud Run in Pennsylvania. Tilden, like many New Yorkers, had seen the article, but Smithberg brushed aside his attempt to say so. An excursion train, Smithberg recounted, had been carrying members of the Total Abstinence Union to a rally in the town of Hazleton. It seemed, however, that neither the union's members nor the train's crew were totally abstemious. Their intake of beverages led to an unplanned relief stop, and in the course of it the train was struck from behind by another. The last two cars were telescoped, and sixty-four men, women, and children were killed outright. Smithberg read aloud an account by a local correspondent. “Oh, what tongue could tell,” the anonymous author had written, “or what pen picture this most dreadful calamity? The roasting, scalding engine under which were crushed those poor young children, and the car ahead being ground to splinters and the lives crushed out of those who but a few moments since were full of life. Oh, God, why visit upon your unhappy children such a death.”

  The breast-beating tone of that selection carried over into a listing of the dead, continued on page 12. On that list, Tilden saw, a number of names had been underscored. One of them, Hiram Forsythe Corbin of Wilkes-Barre, said to have left a wife heavy with child, was followed by two check marks.

  “There you have it, sir.” The lawyer slapped the newspaper with his palm.

  “There I have what, Mr. Smithberg?”

  “It was a mistake. There is no wife, no child, no known relatives in point of fact. The man's body was unclaimed. The city of Wilkes-Barre interred him this morning.”

  “He had no friends? No position in the community?”

  Andrew Smithberg beamed. “Young Hiram had only just arrived in town two months before. The story is that he'd been a second mate aboard a China clipper these past four years and had a yen to settle on land. He was drifting west from Baltimore with a wagonload of Chinese silks when he passed through Wilkes-Barre and saw a dry goods store up for lease. The papers he signed list no next of kin. The attorney who drew them up tells me that Hiram Corbin was hardly a teetotaler, but he went on that excursion in the hope of meeting the townspeople a bit more quickly.”

  “You are about to suggest,” Tilden mused, “that he would serve nicely as Margaret's late husband and that Margaret would serve equally well as the wife left heavy with child.”

  “Not Margaret.” Smithberg shook his head. “Charlotte. The name Charlotte Whitney Corbin gives her one more remove from Margaret Barrie. It is perfect, Mr. Beckwith.”

  Tilden hesitated. He was finding, to his mild surprise, that he did not care for the notion of another man's name attached to Margaret's, even a man she'd never known, even at one more remove, as Smithberg put it. An invented ghost would have been more to his liking. Still, Smithberg was right It did seem ideal.

  “You can provide any other documents she might need?” he asked.

  ”A simple matter. She'll already have the New York Times clipping. And I can create a paper past dating all the way back to her birth. She'll have been born on a farm. Or in a town whose records are no longer extant for one reason or another. Thousands of people are living without evidence of their existence because a church or a town hall has burned to the ground. As for evidence of Hiram Corbin, photographs of young seamen are obtainable among the samples of any waterfront studio. A few yards of Chinese silk, an ivory fan, a piece or two of carved ebony furniture, and she'll have all the artifacts necessary to satisfy the curious who might visit her Greenwich home.”

  “The stage props will not be necessary.” Tilden made a face. “Only the papers.”

  “They would lend great credibility. It would be very natural for a young wife to keep mementos of her dear departed husband.”

  “Only the papers, Mr. Smithberg.”

  ‘'Corbin,” Margaret repeated, trying on the name as she would a gown. “It has an honest sound, Tilden. Charlotte Whitney Corbin.”

  It crossed Tilden's mind, not for the first time, that Margaret Barrie might not have been the name she was born with, either. But it did not much matter to him. The name of any girl had always seemed to him a temporary thing, having little significance as an identity if it were so easily surrendered upon an exchange of wedding vows. Wedding vows.

  “Tilden, dearest, you seem troubled,” she said to him.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not at all. Just some office business I have neglected.”

  If she had said, / despise this new name, Tilden. If she had said, I feel as you, Tilden. It seems like another man's body against mine and I want no body but yours and no name but yours. If she had said, Be not fearful for me or fearful of Gould and Carling and Colonel Mann or of the women who whisper sly stories over cups of tea, but let me and our child be an adornment to you and to the name Beckcwith, he might have swept her into his arms and driven her to the nearest magistrate. But she did not because she had made a bargain. And he did not, as he was beginning to know, because he was a fool.

  Two more weeks passed, as did another scurrilous mention in Town Topics, which Tilden kept from her, before Andrew Smithberg appeared with all the papers needed for the purchase of a Greenwich property by a young widow named Charlotte Corbin. The furnishings were now in place, and true to Tilden’ s word, the house had been electrified and a telephone installed and a glistening bathroom was inside the house and a shiny new carriage and sled awaited in the barn. Everyone knew there was profit in the China trade. Margaret moved in just before Thanksgiving.

  Two neighbors appeared on the very first day, bearing casseroles and fresh-baked bread. Mr. Smithberg was there, as was Tilden, who was obviously nervous and awkwardly solicitous of the very pregnant and very lovely young widow. The neighbors, ladies of early middle age with large families of their own, understood Mr. Beckwith to be the owner of this property before selling it to Mrs. Corbin, and they understood his behavior to be that of a man suddenly smitten upon coming face to face with a woman he had heretofore met only through Mr. Smithberg. Andrew Smith-berg assisted them in coming to this conclusion. It would not surprise him at all, he told Mrs. Gannon and Mrs. Redway in confidence, if young Mr. Beckwith, a tragic widower himself, begged the honor of calling upon Mrs. Corbin in future. Confidence notwithstanding, the two ladies lost little time in encouraging Margaret to receive him.

  The child was born, to the delight of all, on Christmas morning. A healthy son, delivered there in the house and without great distress by Dr. Miles Palmer with the assistance of a young and very large black nurse named Lucy Stone. Mrs. Redway had been with Margaret since before dawn, having been alerted by the prearranged signal of flashing electric lights that the pains of labor had begun. . Mrs. Redway called first Dr. Palmer and then Tilden Beckwith, who had taken a room in the Indian Harbor Hotel. She spent much of the morning calming him and pouring coffee for him even after the first cry of life sounded from the room upstairs. A body would think
he was an anxious father if she didn't know perfectly well that they'd been acquainted barely a month. Mrs. Redway was charmed. Perhaps the dear baby would not long be denied a father after all.

  The noon church bells sounded before Tilden was allowed a short private visit. Margaret was pale but without much discomfort, even though she had refused Dr. Palmer's offer of laudanum.

  “Oh, Tilden, look,” she said upon returning his kiss, “he is the image of you. I'm afraid a tongue or two is going to wag.”

  Tilden, who thought all newborns resembled halibuts as much as anything, pretended nonetheless to share her conviction of their resemblance.

  “He is a Beckwith, to be sure.” Tilden squeezed her hand. “Though on the inside I'd be proud if he's more of a Barrie.”