Sybil clutched for her zipper folder. It wasn't there. The elevator wasn't there, either, or the long, dusky hall. She was standing on a long, narrow street covered with snow. The elevator hadn't come for her, but instead of waiting, she was walking.
A sharp, pungent wind whipped her. Snow, white, crackling, and swirling, was underfoot. She had no overshoes, no gloves, no hat; her ears ached with numbness. The light gray convertible tweed coat, which had seemed warm enough when she walked to the lab from her apartment on Morningside Drive, now offered painfully little protection against the unrelenting cold.
Sybil looked for a street sign. There wasn't any. She looked for a house, in which she might find refuge. There was none. A gas station? She didn't see any. A drugstore? None.
Drugstore. Chemistry lab. The long, dusky hall. Elevator. None here. There was only this street, this poorly lighted, deserted, nameless street in a place she didn't recognize.
Old, ugly, massive wooden structures--some painted battleship gray, others covered with sheet metal--lined both sides of the street. There were overhead entrances, huge doors below, and windows with tiny panes.
It couldn't be New York. Maybe it was some part of her native Wisconsin, where as a child she had been through many winter storms like this and had known what it was like to have chilblains. Ridiculous. How could she have gotten to Wisconsin in the split second between standing at the Columbia University elevator and now? But then she couldn't have gotten anywhere in that time. Maybe she hadn't; maybe she wasn't anywhere. Maybe this was a nightmare.
Yet as she walked faster, reality confronted her in the form of the ugly buildings and the constantly falling snow, which she wiped from her face with her gloveless hand and tried to shake from her body by gyrating from side to side. She knew that she couldn't have invented those barricaded structures; she had never seen anything like them before. The doors were huge not because she was imagining them that way but because they were used for storage and shipping. The realistic part of her imagination took hold again, and she knew that she was in a warehouse district.
A black silhouette against the white snow, the figure of a man, suddenly appeared on the other side of the street. He seemed as unapproachable as a passing shadow, as inanimate as the buildings that dwarfed her. Even though he could undoubtedly tell her where she was, she could not reach out to him. Besides, she feared that if she did, he would misunderstand her motives. She just let him pass into what seemed to be night, hurrying to a world beyond the warehouses and beyond her entreaty.
For Sybil there seemed no exit, just as there had been no entrance. The barricade of buildings, although outside herself, blended with her innermost fears. She felt closed in, shut off, imprisoned, trapped--without and within.
Was there no rescue? No taxi? Bus? Nothing to take her somewhere, anywhere so long as it was away from this non-place? Although just before getting off a crosstown bus in New York, her present home, she had always been prone to an odd, balky feeling, now she was even willing to risk a bus. The matter, however, was purely academic, since there was none. There was nothing.
A phone booth became pivotal in her thinking. If she could find one, she not only would know where she was but could also call Teddy Eleanor Reeves, her roommate, who must certainly be worried about her. Then Sybil remembered that Teddy had left for a vacation with her family in Oklahoma soon after she herself had left for the lab.
Ironically, Teddy had urged Sybil to wear a warmer coat when she had left their apartment. She had not listened because it had been one of the days when she couldn't listen. All that day, especially after it had begun to turn cold, she had felt overwhelmed by feelings of uneasiness and by strange stirrings within her, which had made it impossible for her to stay in the apartment even the extra minutes required for changing her coat Sybil also wanted to call Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur. If enough time had gone by, the doctor, too, would surely be worried about her. Maybe Sybil had missed her hour with the doctor. Could she have missed many hours by now?
The word "now" was tantalizing, elusive since there was no knowing how much time had passed since she had been waiting at the elevator. If only she could remember, piece together what had brought her here, maybe she could understand. There could be no peace for her until she did.
A telephone seemed the most likely link to reality, though looking for one was like searching for a mirage. Somehow she had to find one, to keep moving long enough to do so. She felt she couldn't go on, but she also knew that she didn't dare stop. Her legs seemed frozen; yet if she did not go on, she knew from her experience with midwestern winters that she might freeze to death.
Forcing herself to keep moving, she listened for sounds, for life. There was only the wind. Block after block along glassy streets failed to reveal a single street sign. The hope of a telephone became even more vain.
As if to steady herself, at least momentarily, Sybil stopped at a street lamp. Aided by its dim light she opened her purse and rummaged through it. Her Social Security card, Blue Cross card, driver's license, Columbia University library card--each brought the reassurance of recognition.
Her billfold, which had contained $50 and some change when she had left her apartment, contained only $37.42 now. She had walked to the lab, bought nothing after she got there. Had she paid the missing cash to travel to this place? She had waited at the elevator; then she was here. That was all she could remember.
The key to her apartment was lying neatly in its compartment. Dangling from a large, reddish-brown tag, however, was a key she had never seen before. Turning it over and over in her almost frozen hand, she looked at it again and again, reading and rereading its gilt letters: room 1113.
What was this key doing in her purse? Where had it come from? Obviously it was a hotel key, but unlike most hotel keys, it bore no name or address, no clue as to what city this was.
Maybe this was a nightmare after all? No, the key was tangible, the tag was solid, the lamppost was real. So were the ugly structures that seemed to leer at and mock her. Real, too, was the snow that clung to her coat and legs. And there was motion in the legs; despite her fears, her legs were not frozen. As she hurried on, knowing that she had no destination, she appreciated the grim humor of rushing to no place. Yet onward she went-- running from no place to nowhere--racing to outstrip her mounting panic.
The key to room 1113 was the engine that drove her, the motor on which her panic turned. Then suddenly the key brought not panic but a measure of comfort. That key opened some hotel room door, a retreat from the cold, a haven. There she could at least be warm, get some food, rest.
Walking rapidly, looking at each street intersection for an approaching vehicle, Sybil grew angry with herself for not having made a more determined effort to find a taxi or bus. Although she had allowed herself to be trapped, now, whether or not it was the one to which the anonymous key led, she would find a hotel. Certainly there was a world beyond the warehouses.
Then a new terror overtook her. What if she had picked up the key on the street? She didn't remember doing so, but she didn't remember much. What if at some time in the past she had been in that room for days, weeks, even months or years and had been forced to leave for not paying her bill? In both cases the room would now be someone else's. Should she throw the key away? Free herself from possible guilt?
No. There was no key, no room, no shelter, no refuge, no world, only more of this no-woman's land, where unreal silhouettes of men could flit by in the snow, reawakening the black and white images that had always terrified her.
There was no end to these long, narrow streets. No house would ever show a light. These barred windows--how she feared them--echoed old fears, fears that had followed her wherever she had lived and had now followed her to this non-place.
Suddenly there was a light. A gas station. A telephone at last and a directory to give this place a name.
According to the directory, she was in Philadelphia, a city she had visited many times, but not
once in all those visits had she been in this area.
The phone booth beckoned to her, seemed to invite her presence. But when, accepting its invitation, she stood within the cagelike confines of its hospitality, hospitality turned to rebuff. Intending to call Dr. Wilbur's home number, she inserted a dime in the slot to ask for long distance but heard only a metallic nothingness. The telephone was dead.
She approached the gas station attendant and asked whether she could use his private phone. "Sorry, lady," he replied. "Sorry."
All she saw, as he walked from her and closed the door in her face, was the back of his retreating white coat.
Her fear, she knew, had made him afraid. But contact with another person permitted her to decide to call from the Broadwood Hotel, where she always stayed when she visited Philadelphia.
The thought of the Broadwood and the knowledge that she was in a city she knew well lifted some of the terror. She took time to visit the washroom, where she let hot water run over her hands. Returning to the street, she noticed for the first time the Delaware River and on its other shore, Camden. Both had been there all the time.
The Delaware was familiar. She had once done an impressionistic water color of it while Capri sat at her side. The cat, who had watched every stroke of the brush, had occasionally taken a swipe at the brush handle as if to remind Sybil of her presence.
Street signs began to become visible. Front Street. Callowhill Street.
Spring Gardens. On Front Street, between Callowhill and Spring Gardens, there were overhead elevated tracks. As Sybil approached a corner, she noticed a light, a city bus.
"Wait, wait," Sybil called frantically.
The florid-faced driver waited.
And then, acutely aware of an aching in her arms and legs, Sybil collapsed in a window seat in the rear of the bus. She was ready to go wherever the bus would take her, anywhere, everywhere, world beyond, world without end--anywhere.
Why were these other passengers--three men and a woman wearing a beaver hat--out on a night like this? But was it night? The maddeningly anonymous in-between gray of the overcast sky withheld the clue as to whether it was night or morning. She didn't know the date, either. If she were to ask the other passengers, what a fool they'd think her!
The enigmatic key in her purse, which also withheld all clues, once again possessed her. A Broadwood key? She didn't know. Nor did she know whether she was on her way to the Broadwood Hotel. She could easily get there, however, from wherever the bus took her. Eager to find out, she walked to the front of the bus and asked the driver: "Do you go anywhere near Broad and Wood?"
"Three blocks from it," he replied. "Shall I call you?"
Through the bus window, despite its frosty face, she recognized Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Logan Free Library, the Franklin Institute, and Fairmont Park. She remembered with excitement the two granite memorials in the park. On one, which was of soldiers in bas relief, was the inscription: "One country; one constitution. In giving freedom to slaves we assure freedom to the free." She had painted that war memorial. She must keep her mind on anything, everything, except the key. Except my life, except my life --wasn't that what Hamlet had said?
"Your corner," the driver called to her. She was on terra firma again. Infirm with the skidding conditions of the roads and the slippery sidewalks, it was firm with the solidity of familiar landmarks: the Academy of Fine Arts, on Broad and Cherry Streets, the Hahnemann Hospital, and then, a present reality at last, the gold dome atop the Broadwood Hotel.
Finally, the red brick sixteen-story Broadwood Hotel stood before her. It had a diamond pattern up to the third floor and a white cornice.
Across the street from the hotel were the Roman Catholic High School for boys and an old building that used to be the home of the Philadelphia Morning Record. In front of the Broadwood there was a subway station. The subway had been there since 1927, someone had told her. And the Broadwood itself had been built in 1923 by the Elks. That was the year she was born. Funny.
Becoming annoyed with herself for lingering outside the hotel when she could already have been inside, she finally took the fateful plunge of entering. It seemed to Sybil that it was as difficult to ascend the three steps to the Broadwood's heavy glass front door as to climb Mt. Everest. Her ascent was into the unknown.
In the main lobby she stared at the torchlike lamps suspended from the ceiling, scrutinized the familiar marble, the yellow, black, and white tile floor. Although she knew this lobby well from previous visits, she noted each detail as if she were looking at it for the first time.
Should she register? She hesitated. Should she head for room 1113 on the supposition that it was free and that she had a Broadwood Hotel key? She ran up the fifteen steps to the rotunda. That was a safe detour from both desk and elevator--the Scylla and Charybdis of her terror.
The rotunda was dominated by a stained glass terrazzo tile marble window forty feet high. It was a beautiful window, overlooking a mezzanine. Inscribed on the rotunda's gold leaf ceiling was the motto: "Fidelity, Justice, Vanity, Brotherly Love--their virtues upon the tablets of love and memory. The faults of our brothers we write upon the sand."
For a few fleeting minutes, as Sybil stared at the ceiling, she felt relaxed by its beauty, but the sensation passed as she slowly retraced her steps from the rotunda to the main lobby. Again taking refuge in extraneous things, she noted how the place had changed since she had last been here. The bellhops were not the same. Nor had she ever seen the owlish, bosomy woman at the registration desk. And then, lingering at the interior store window of Persky's Portraits, Sybil tried to force herself to decide whether to register or to go to room 1113, to which the inexplicable key could conceivably lead. Unable to decide, she rushed out to Broad Street.
At the newsstand in front of the Broadwood she bought a copy of the Philadelphia Bulletin. It was dated January 7, 1958. As if disbelieving the date, she bought the Philadelphia Inquirer. It too was dated January 7.
January 7. She had left the chemistry lab on January 2. Five days lost.
The fear of not knowing had been replaced by an even greater fear--knowing.
"Do you have the time?" she managed with assumed nonchalance to ask the newsdealer.
"Nine o'clock," he replied.
Nine P.m. It had been 8:45 P.m. when she had waited at the Columbia elevator. Almost five days to the hour had intervened.
Slowly, fearfully, Sybil once again pushed open the heavy glass door of the hotel. Panic and a sense of remorse and self-recrimination awakened by the knowledge that she had lost five days compelled her to hurry. Someone, she dimly perceived, was calling to her. It was the owlish, bosomy woman at the registration desk. "Hello, there," the woman was saying, her large head bobbing over the desk in recognition, her eyebrows so prominent that they seemed like the stiff-feathered disks of an owl, by which Sybil had first characterized her.
"Do you have a minute?" the woman called. "I want to talk to you."
As if mesmerized, Sybil came to a halt. "Now, when you get to your room," the woman said solemnly, "take a hot bath and get some hot tea. I was so worried about you out in that storm. "Don't go out," I begged you. You wouldn't listen. This is no weather to monkey around with."
"Thank you. I'm all right," Sybil replied somewhat stiffly.
The woman smiled at her as she headed toward the bank of elevators.
Sybil could swear--in a court of law she would have sworn on oath--that it had been a year since she had been at the Broadwood. In that same court, however, the woman at the desk, who had not worked at the hotel the previous year, would have sworn, also on oath, that Sybil had been in the hotel earlier that January 7.
One of the two elevator doors swung open. Sybil, anxious and deeply apprehensive, entered the car. She was the only passenger.
"Eleven, please," she said.
"Out in that storm?" the elevator boy asked. She whispered, "Yes."
"Eleven," he called.
The elevator do
or closed behind Sybil, its metallic clang registering in her spine as had the uncomprehending eyes in the chemistry lab. Between the two elevators time had not existed. Remorse quickened at the thought.
Was there really a room 1113? The numbers on the doors, 1105, 1107, 1109, 1111, heralded a probable 1113. Then flashing, receding, and flashing, as if it were in neon lights, was 1113!
Sybil opened her purse, removed the key, turned it over in her unsteady hand, caught her breath, started to place the key in the lock, turned it over again, and wondered whether it was really the key to this door.
Go in? Go back?
She inserted the key in the lock. It fitted. The door swung open. Sybil faced room 1113.
Nobody spoke. Nobody stirred or moved. Did that mean that nobody was there?
She pressed her body against the doorjamb and, without entering the room, moved her hand over the nearest wall in search of a light switch. When the light went on, the thrust of her hand unleashed a floodlight on her fears of what she might find. Stepping into the room and closing the door behind her, she stood transfixed, unmoving.
As far as she knew, she had never before been in the room. But if this weren't her room, where had she slept from January 2 to January 7, how did she come by the key? She could not have been in the street all that time.
Was she registered? The woman at the desk downstairs had acted as if she were.
Sybil removed her wet coat and placed it on a chair, kicked off her wet shoes, and slumped into the green chair near the window.
She didn't know that the room was hers, but somehow, from the way the woman had talked, she didn't think it was anybody else's, either.
For a time she just stared vacantly through the window at the Roman Catholic High School for boys and at the building that used to house the Philadelphia Morning Record. Then, unable to find solace in just sitting, she reached for the newspapers that she had brought with her.
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER FINAL CITY EDITION INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER FOR ALL THE PEOPLE My eyes are heavy with exhaustion.
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