20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  Afterward, they went indoors for naps and I strolled with Bud to his garage—doors wide open, of course—and we talked about his cars. When I called them antique, he said, “The only antique is that Stanley Steamer my grandfather brought.” We then talked about his newest acquisition, an Oldsmobile four-door convertible he told me was ridden in by—get this—“Fiorello when he opened the New York’s World’s Fair. Look inside on the floor, notice anything different?” Bud asked.

  I looked, said I didn’t notice anything different.

  “You must be blind! This car has no clutch!” Bud exulted.

  They came out again and I said I’d bring a “Speedie” for Tony to wear. I also flirted outrageously with Celia. And waited for you know what.

  But they never disappeared and I ended up leaving to go do thesis work.

  Crazy as all this may be and crazy as I may be, I am developing a “theory” in which I am not completely insane. Which itself is probably a perfect sign of my insanity.

  June 25, 2000

  Went to town, had lunch in the pharmacy—Bev flew out as I came in, not even looking at me—and afterward I stopped in the library. I was looking up dates in the big Encyclopedia Americana they’ve got there when Ms. Noonan—”“Please, Neal. Call me Tonia! All my friends do!”—asked what I was doing, and when I mentioned the time period I was looking for, she brought over two reference books. One was a Time-Life Book, 1933–1942, the other was a Time Line book, Black Tuesday to Pearl Harbor. So I opened the first and it had photos and there they were, photos of girls with their hair cut like Celia’s, wearing those short-sleeved sweaters and long skirts like she does, and guys with those big bathing suits like Bud and Tony’s. And there were the photos of the 1939 World’s Fair, with Mayor “Fiorello” La Guardia riding in Bud’s car, which the caption said was the very first car on sale with automatic transmission. (“You must be blind! This car has no clutch!”) And when I looked in the Time Line under “literary best sellers,” sure enough I found Chandler’s mystery, The Big Sleep, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, arguably his most “communistic” book, all of it together under what year?

  1940.

  1940. Almost two years before the U.S got involved in World War II. Eleven years after the Depression began. About three or four after the country really began to pull out of that depression. A sort of magic twenty-four months of American life—teetering between a bad past and a worse to come future.

  Okay, here’s My Theory: Bud Ingals, Celia Nash, and Tony Kirby are living in the summer of 1940. And when I’m there with them, so am I.

  Comments are not asked for and not required.

  So naturally I concentrated on that year and I looked up as much as I could.

  I was there all afternoon, taking tons of notes. Finally Tonia stepped out and came back, carrying a Snapple Ginseng Tea—guess she’s seen me sipping them—and we talked about the “good old times” together. “I’ll bet people were a whole lot nicer then,” she mused and really seemed sweet. (If I could only shake off all the powder she wears, like in a shower or something, she might be do-able. She’s not that old. And she does seem awfully interested in me and—should I write it—awfully ready.)

  By the way, also on that best seller list, a Pocket Book, one of the first paperbacks, costing 25 cents—are you ready?—Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

  At any rate, here goes more evidence for my theory: The three occupants of Ingoldsby dress in fashions of 1940 and speak a more formal English, even when trying to be casual. Their slang is, well, let’s face it, pretty old hat. If they are, what can one call them? Not apparitions: they’re as physically solid and touchable as me—and they’re really are living in 1940—though I have no idea how!—still at least that can be tested, proven.

  June 27, 2000

  So I’m home after dinner last night and I’m about to work on my thesis and playing back some verbal notes on my cassette recorder when I hear this car horn going “Ooga! Ooga!” downstairs. I flip a new tape into it, saying, “Could this be a sound of 1940! Can sounds they make be heard and recorded?” You know, a real Dan Rather. When I hear a shout outside the window and go look, it’s Joe Weyerhauser standing up in the passenger seat of this big old red convertible Doc is driving. Seems it’s Doc’s ’55 Buick Roadmaster.

  They say they’ve got two six-packs of beer and three kinds of chips—potato, tortilla, and corn—do I wanna play gin?

  What a schmuck I am, thinking it was Bud and the others!

  Doc and Joe come up and I clear the table and we begin to play.

  Halfway through the game I begin asking questions about Ingoldsby. You know, as casual as possible. How come no one’s lived there in over fifty years like Torrington told me. Since I would live there in a second if given the chance, and all. Doc is being close-mouthed but Joe spills that “no one from the Ingals family ever used the place regularly after what happened there.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. Me, innocent: “Oh? What happened there?”

  Seems according to the two of them—mostly agreeing, though not always—back “before the Second World War” there was a freak fire and it killed the heir to the Ingals fortune along with two of his friends. Then Joe says, allegedly killed them, since his grandpa, who was on the volunteer fire force, always insisted that no bodies were ever recovered from the fire.

  When I ask more pointed questions, Doc, who’s about seventy-two or so and must have been a kid of twelve at the time, tells me lots of rumors he heard, then clams up and tells Joe to do so too. So naturally I ask if the three who died in the fire are the ghosts.

  “Why?” Doc asks me, point-blank. “You seeing ghosts at Ingoldsby?”

  Very sharp! He already thinks I’m mental. What could I say except of course not, but I’d heard about them in town. Slick escape from that one.

  At least I won four dollars off them!

  June 28, 2000

  The microfiche newspapers at the Fulton’s Point Library only go back fifty years. If I want earlier I’ve got to go to Junction City. I’m driving there today.

  June 29, 2000

  Saw Bev again last night. We didn’t even have dinner. Just sex. No talk, no pretenses anymore, we just got down to the nitty-gritty.

  But the real news is what I found at the Junction City Intelligencer, Portage County’s newspaper “since 1871!” which for a dollar allowed me to read, select, and photocopy its paper for May 26th, 1940. Went to the J.C. Library too, which carried other Wisconsin and even Chicago newspapers for the time. And sure enough Chester Ingals, Anthony Kirby, and Cecilia Nash were all believed dead or missing after a freak lightning strike and resulting fire that gutted the front half of the Ingals home, outside of Fulton’s Point, “around three-thirty in the afternoon.”

  People driving on Lakeview Drive (now Route 18) saw black smoke, drove to get nearer and were stopped at the gates of Ingoldsby. They managed to get into the gate-house apartment and call the fire department. By the time the Keystone Kops and Cellar-Savers arrived, the entire living quarters of the house had been gutted, but not the bedrooms. The high winds charred it to nothing and alighted on the multicar garage where Ingals had his collection of expensive and rare automobiles.

  The reporter wrote how stormy the past three weeks were: more lightning storms (12) and more tornado touch-downs (6) than in any previous recorded year.

  *

  Meaning what exactly for me? That they are ghosts.

  Except I happen to know they aren’t. They’re as real as I am. Especially Celia.

  Now for something truly sick. While I was screwing Bev the other night, guess who I was fantasizing about? You guessed it, The Long Dead Celia Nash. Nobody but me better read this. Maybe I should stop writing. it. No, all this is so weird, I’ve got to keep getting it down or I’ll really begin to think I’ve gone over the edge.

  Oh, here’s the article. I scanned it into the C drive:

  June 30, 2000

 
It doesn’t stop getting interesting, does it? Here’s an unexpected turn of events.

  I was down at Ingoldsby’s pool doing laps late yesterday afternoon, vaguely wondering where the three were, when they drove up in Bud’s 1933 Dusenberg. The wheels are made of chromed stainless steel and are huge. The whole thing is gorgeous. At any rate, they had just been to a matinee at the Fulton Theater, and Celia couldn’t stop talking about the new movie they just saw which was—ta da! The Philadelphia Story! I.e., that old black-and-white movie I must have seen about a dozen times because Gina played it so many times and wouldn’t shut up talking about it all the time.

  Celia was completely taken with it, and so was Tony. They were acting out scenes between Jimmy Stewart and Kate Hepburn and getting all the lines wrong but having a good time doing it. Me and Bud were sitting back with lemonades enjoying it all.

  They were enthusing about it, really excited, Tony assuring everyone that Hepburn was going to get the Oscar for it that year, and Celia saying, no no, Cary Grant would, when it just pops out of my mouth. “You’re both wrong. Stewart gets the Oscar.” Moment of silence. They ignored me and chattered on, but a minute later Bud took me out onto the living room terrace and said, “I believe you. But then you know for sure, don’t you?”

  I tried to get out of it. But he was not about to be diverted. “Just like you already know how to drive a car without a clutch, don’t you? You probably drive one every day.” Then he lifted up a copy of Popular Mechanics left on the table, with its cover reading “Frequency Modulation: Is it the Wireless of the Future?” And he asked me, “Well, is it?” When I didn’t respond, he said that he spoke to the main office of his company in Chicago and they never hired a caretaker named Neal Bartram. Never heard of him. Nor is there such a student currently enrolled at Northwestern University in the History Ph.D. program.

  So I told Bud I’d be happy to show him the signed contract I have for my summer work—as well as my student ID, even though both have the current year on them.

  The weather started up, thunderheads out of the west, the north, the east, a real mess. A few drops of rain, but distant rumblings so far, reminding me of that newspaper report. Then Celia and Tony’s high spirits found us outside, and she waltzed Bud away while Tony foxtrotted me indoors. After a minute or so of awkwardness, he took the girl’s part.

  After an hour or so of avoiding Bud, I managed to get away. He was so down, however, that when I left I whispered into his ear, “FM radio, yes. And we do eventually fight Hitler.” He held my jacket until I said, “Yes. We beat the pants off him.”

  “But how can you be here?” he asked, following me outside again. I told him I didn’t have any idea how. But that we aren’t always in sync, somehow. When he asked what I meant, I pointed to the lightning beginning to strike down on the lawns, as close as the garage roof. “Whatever brings us together, this is what separates us!”

  “The rain?” he asked. “No, the lightning,” I told him. Just then, Kr-rack, loud and blinding, and twice more. I was alone and they were gone and the house was all locked up.

  So now I’m sure the lightning has something to do with it. And as the house was burned half up by a freak lightning strike, I just know there is a connection between the two.

  July 1, 2000

  One of those teenage girls who are always hanging around—Ashley, her name is, the one who actually has some boobies—slipped a note into my hand yesterday as the three of us were talking at my car. I looked at it and it was her phone number. Just what I need. But I called and said, look, this age difference thing and all. But she said no, it was about Ingoldsby. Would I meet her. All cloak and dagger like she’s one of the Spy Kids in the movie. So I drive over to behind the town hall section near the police station and she tells me that the estate has a weird reputation and one of the caretakers went missing from there a while ago. Her grandpa was a landscaper and he’ll tell me all about it. I humored her. Took down Grandpa’s phone number and all. Won’t call him unless I need to.

  I had asked the Junction City newspaper’s archives to notify me if they found anything else on Ingoldsby in their files. They sent me one from eight months later, about Bud’s will providing funds to rebuild the house as it was.

  Here it is scanned in:

  So yesterday that dweeby funny guy Jim Kleinherz phones me and says he found a Follow-Up story from a few days after the fire. And did I want to see it? Did I? I got him to scan it in and then e-mail it to me.

  Guess what? They never found the bodies. Let me write that once more. They never found the bodies at all. Meaning what? That they were not killed by the fire.

  Then what happened to them? Well, I’m developing a second theory, this one even nuttier than the first. But hey, that one seems to be kind of right, doesn’t it?

  It means I’ve got to take one of the three into my confidence and probe. Bud is the “scientific” one and so he might be the one. Not Celia. I don’t want to expose her to this. On the other hand, Bud really reacted to what I told him. Or did he? On second thought, he didn’t react that much. I thought that was because he’d already thought about it a while, and so had sort of gotten used to the idea. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe he knows something that…that what?

  Only one thing to do. Ask him.

  Here’s what Kleinherz sent me:

  July 3, 2000

  Okay, Tony and me had “the talk.” This was his doing entirely and began with Tony asking if I could trust him, really trust him? I said sure, though it sounded so…dramatic!

  “Isn’t it?” he asked back. Then told me that he was torn between his best friend since school, the fellow who’d treated him best in life of anyone, and the girl he loved…who—get this—loved him back.

  I burst into laughter. Seeing this, Tony stared at me and asked what on earth was wrong with me. “Here I am, unveiling my deepest secret to you, and…”

  “Your deepest secret?” I asked. Then I said that his deepest secret, if it even was one, which I strongly doubted, was that he was gay and covering it up.

  “Of course I’m gay,” he said. Then he said they all were. Or tried to be.

  I insisted that he had to know what I meant. Gay as in Queer. Homosexual. Like my dormmate Nate in college? Gay Nate the gay roommate? The guy who ended up living with the center from the varsity basketball team?

  Amazement. Tony reacted with extreme shock. So I quickly told him that obviously it was totally okay with me. Not that I was personally inclined that way myself, despite my roommate Nate, but that I thought it was great and that he should “Go for it!”

  When Tony still didn’t respond, I said that with his looks, he should be able to get almost any guy he wanted.

  To which Tony drew himself up to his full six-foot, one-inch height. “Mr. Bartram, exactly what universe do you think you’re living in, where open…relations between two men is, as you so blithely put it, ‘okay’?”

  Then he stormed off. Believe me, I got out of his way.

  Still, it needed to be said.

  July 5, 2000

  This is completely nuts. If you’ve been reading this, you know I’m not the most romantic guy in the world. And yet, and yet, I think I’ve fallen for Celia Nash.

  Jeez. Did I just write that?

  Not only have I fallen for her, but yesterday at the little barbecue she and Bud did outside on the living room terrace, he and Tony went off at one point to toss a football on the lawn while the steaks cooked, leaving us alone to talk. She began flirting, I flirted back. Then she said, kind of breathlessly, “I know you’ve got a woman in town.”

  How did she know?

  Tony told her. “We never hide anything from each other.”

  Thanks a lot, Tony. I haven’t told anyone you’re queer, have I?

  I told Celia that Bev was a nice woman but that she meant nothing emotionally to me. That I’d stop seeing her if Celia wanted me to. In fact, I would stop seeing her period.

  Yes, boys and g
irls, I actually said those words. And meant them. I was supposed to see Bev tomorrow. But I won’t.

  Celia said, “Well, the puzzle is that none of us are at all certain of your intentions.”

  I told her my intentions were “honorable toward her.” Can you believe I said that? Yet it’s true. It is. Really. Then before she could do more than register that, I said that my intentions were honorable and serious. Gosh, she looked wonderful at that. Did I just write the word “Gosh”? What is happening to me? Then I asked if Bud would allow me to pay court to her, being a lowly caretaker and all.

  I knew she’d say that didn’t matter a bit to her—hey! she reads Gorky and Steinbeck and they love “the common man” —but that it might to Bud.

  Except I added, I was actually appearing under false pretenses, since besides the degree I was close to getting, which would get me a good job teaching in college almost anywhere, I also happened to have some money stashed away myself, with more coming in. I didn’t tell her how I got the money (Yet. Do people die in commuter airplane crashes in her time? They don’t, do they?), being sixty-five grand per person that’s been paid to me from my parents’ insurance policies. Or that I’ve also got about two hundred and seventy-five grand due to me (from the sale of my folks’ house).

  “Why, Mr. Bartram!” she said, trying to be angry. “You’re rich! At least as rich as Tony. And far richer than poor me!”

  I’d forgotten, hadn’t I, that in a time when most mansions cost twenty grand and a Caddie goes for three or four grand, having four hundred grand in the bank means something. Unlike today when it means bupkus.