Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  Walking up to the third floor, I realized that I should have tested the duplicate first; but it worked fine. It rattled into the keyhole, caught the tumblers smoothly, revolved; then I turned the knob and stepped into Jake Pickering's secret office.

  It was filled with filing cabinets, thirteen of them—I counted—set side by side around the four walls. They were of yellow oak, three drawers high, each drawer with a vertical metal handle. They were scratched and worn, bought second- or third-hand, it occurred to me. Together with the desk and the chair under the window, they filled two thirds of the little office's floor space. I'd taken the key from the lock and closed the door behind me; now I stood listening for a moment. All quiet, and I locked the door. Then as quietly as possible I began pulling file drawers open at random.

  Some were very heavy, completely full or nearly so. Most were at least half or a quarter filled; one or two contained only a few inches of papers, and in one of these there was also a pair of rubber overshoes, and in another lay a half-full quart bottle labeled Eagle Whisky. The files were extremely neat, no dog-ears of paper sticking out at the tops or sides, and they were separated by tabbed dividers that were very carefully, almost beautifully, printed in either black or red ink. Mostly these markings were combinations of letters or letters and numbers such as LL4; D; A 6, 7, 8; NN, and so on. There was no consistency I could detect; every drawer held a dozen or more such tabs, and with no understandable relationships in the markings. I also saw a tab marked Repeat, another said Undiv. Both, and another was marked ???. Without lifting any of the papers out, I looked at some of them. Just as Pickering had told Carmody, there were invoices, a lot of them, hundreds and maybe thousands in the thirteen cabinets. And there were receipts and memoranda. There were occasional letters, some on business letterheads illustrated with black-and-white drawings of home offices, or of factories proudly pouring black smoke from every chimney. And there were what looked to be actual signed contracts, folded and tied with red tape. I couldn't tell how the papers were grouped; every file I looked at, no matter how labeled, contained papers bearing dozens or scores of dissimilar names.

  The desk's rolltop was up, and I sat down and looked into the pigeon holes and the small upper drawers, touching nothing, just looking. There was a bottle of Daly's Best Bookkeeping Ink, red, and another of black; a little round cardboard box of steel pen nibs; three wooden penholders, all of them chewed at the ends; a scrap of red-and-black-stained rag obviously used as a pen wiper; five unused long blue envelopes; a tan rectangle of chewing tobacco marked with a red metal star; and a folded sheet of paper. This I did touch, taking it out and spreading it flat; the name Jacob Pickering had been written on it in black ink some thirty or forty times, one under the other in a double column. All were clearly in the same handwriting yet greatly varied in style, some much larger and more flowing than others, some very legible, others in a dashing scrawl. He'd been practicing his signature, searching for one he thought most impressive, and I was touched and felt ashamed to be sitting here searching through the man's belongings.

  I didn't stop, though, or consider it. I looked through the lower drawers on each side of the kneehole, and saw a cardboard box half filled with unused file dividers; a tumbler of very thick glass which I suspected had been stolen from a restaurant; a pair of leather slippers; two folded newspaper pages which I opened to find a couple of grease spots, some crumbs, and a dry peach pit; a paper sack containing some bread crusts, four or five soda crackers, and an apple going bad; and there was a head-and-shoulders sepia photograph mounted on stiff cardboard of Julia. I touched that, too, taking it out to hold up to the light from the window. It was good; it caught the shine and thickness of her hair, and the knowing, faintly mischievous look her eyes often had even in repose.

  I put it away and sat back, looking around the room. Squares and rectangles slightly cleaner than the rest of the wall marked where framed pictures or documents had once hung, and there was an upside-down banjo shape where a pendulum clock had been. Now the walls were naked except for an advertising calendar, marked JUNIUS ROOS & SON, PRINTING INKS, and bearing only the last leaf, for December 1880. From the high ceiling hung an upside-down metal T-shape from the ends of which two gas jets projected. The floor was bare wood; beside my chair stood an extremely battered brass spittoon. And that was the office, with absolutely no place to hide.

  I walked over to the doorway that led into the next room. It was in the middle of the wall and completely boarded over with half-inch pine boards five or six inches wide and cut fairly neatly to proper length. But they were ordinary pine with plenty of knotholes, and were only roughly spaced with gaps of an inch or more between the boards. The nailheads had been left protruding an eighth of an inch for easy removal. I'd seen a hardware store on Frankfort Street a few doors down from Park Row, and I left now, locking the door. In ten minutes I was back with a hammer, and I slid it through the gap under the bottom board into the empty room, then pushed it just out of sight around the corner. I knew now how I was going to not only overhear but actually see tonight's meeting—only hours away now—and I left.

  There was one picture I wanted above all; it was the real reason I'd thought of taking Felix's camera along this morning. And now I took the Sixth Avenue El to Twenty-third Street, walked a block east to the intersection of Broadway and Fifth, and out in the street, protected by a marvelous candelabrumlike streetlamp—Why was it ever removed?—I set my camera on the rim of a large horse-trough, and took this time exposure to eliminate the heavy street traffic. And there it is, in the background at the right, the arm of the Statue of Liberty rising high over the trees of Madison Square.

  Here is an enlargement Felix made for me that shows the Statue of Liberty's arm more clearly.

  It was nearly noon, I was hungry, and I saw a saloon a dozen steps down Twenty-third Street. I went in, and it looked exactly the way I thought it ought to: a long bar and brass rail, an ornate mirrored back bar, and a table at the rear filled with food. There were stacks of bread, sliced meat—including ham, chicken, turkey, wild duck, and roast beef—potato salad, a big glass bowl filled with dozens of hard-boiled eggs, and pickles, relish, horseradish, mustard, and I know I've missed plenty of other things: sliced pickled beets, for one. It was all free with a five-cent stein of beer, which I ordered, and which tasted different from today's beer. There was much more taste to it, of malt or hops, I think, I'm not sure which. Sipping the beer, I stood eating all the lunch I could manage, and I read a big oak-framed sign over the back bar: gilt letters against a black background on a shiny mirrorlike glass surface. It read:

  It chills my blood to hear the Blest Supreme

  Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.

  Maintain your rank, vulgarity despise;

  To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.

  You would not swear on a bed of death;

  Reflect! Your Maker now may stop your breath.

  Apparently I was the only one in the place who read it; no one else, including the bartender, gave a goddam for its sentiment, judging from their speech, and I think it was up there solely for its anti-WCTU propaganda value.

  There was a New York City Directory lying at the end of the bar, and I pulled it over: Who was alive in New York City just now? Well, for one, I remembered from a college class in American Literature, there was Edith Wharton; she'd be a young girl of nineteen or twenty now, still unmarried, her family name Jones, observing the New York society she'd eventually write about. But there were four pages of Joneses, of course, and if I ever knew her father's first name, which I doubt, I didn't remember it now. Franklin Roosevelt, I knew, was born in 1882, or at least I thought so. But not in January, and not in New York City, but I looked up "Roosevelt" anyway, and found a dozen or so, including an Elliott and a James. Al Smith, an old-time politician my father used to rant about, was a boy somewhere on the lower East Side now, but I didn't bother looking up "Smith." I found Ulysses S. Grant, listed as living at
3 East 66th Street. Walt Whitman wasn't listed; did he live in Brooklyn? I couldn't remember. But General Custer's wife, Elizabeth B., was listed as "widow" and living at 148 East 18th Street—the Stuyvesant apartment building, maybe?

  I finished my lunch, and was turning to leave when I remembered one more name, and I looked it up. It was there, all right: "Melville, Herman, inspector, h. 104 E. 26th." I walked on up to Twenty-sixth, and found 104 between Fourth and Lexington, on the south side of the street. It was a house, old and even now old-fashioned-looking. I hung around outside it for a few minutes, walking slowly up and down Twenty-sixth Street. I knew he was undoubtedly at work, somewhere in a customs shed along the river, and I didn't really know what he looked like anyway. I just had an idea that if he came along I'd somehow know him, and I'd tell him that I liked Moby Dick very much, which would have been an exaggeration though not entirely. This was sheer foolishness, and after a turn or two in front of the house, I left. I thought of taking a shot of the house, but it was nondescript, uninteresting, and I didn't have much film left; I'd have liked a picture of the man, though.

  At Thirty-fifth and Fifth a bus just like the one Kate and I had ridden was approaching, and I had to take this shot of it; especially since I also got the A.T. Stewart mansion (there at the right) and the twin Astor houses off to the left. This is where the Empire State Building was to go up later. It's a pretty typical view of Fifth Avenue; the wrought-iron railings there in the lower left corner all guard the stairways to the basement levels of a row of New York brownstones absolutely identical to similar rows that survive unchanged in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  A thought broke the surface of my mind like a log breaking loose from the bottom of a lake, and floating slowly up to the top: Julia. Well, what about her? I walked north on Fifth; it was almost warm out now, a lot of blue sky showing through the gray. There was no problem about Julia; I'd settled that in my mind last night, and it was a decision I wasn't going to change. Yet a feeling of nameless worry persisted.

  I'd used over half my film but when I reached Forty-second Street I had to have a photo of the Croton Reservoir. There was a set of rust flecked iron rungs set into the stone wall at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second, and while I doubted that it was allowed, I climbed to the top; after the bridge it was nothing. Up on top, standing at the corner looking south, I took the shot below; the reservoir there on the right, more brownstones on the left, exactly like those I mentioned, further south. I think this view gives an even better idea of how narrow Fifth is. Was. Notice the sidewalks; they're of cut stone, not concrete.

  For a dozen seconds I stood there on the Croton Reservoir staring down at the carriage stopped at the curb in the lower left of the photo I'd just taken, but I wasn't really looking at it. There was something I was neglecting, and it was about Julia. But nothing happened in my mind, and when a woman came out of the house—the mansion, really—to enter the waiting carriage below me, the liveried driver hopping down to open the door for her, I sighed, slung my camera over my shoulder, and climbed carefully down.

  At Forty-fourth Street I took this. I feel certain that Ye Olde Willow Cottage was a relic of colonial times. Inside Tyson's, entire carcasses were hanging, though in too much shadow to show on my film.

  In the fashionable Fifties the crowds were heavier, but I got a shot of William K. Vanderbilt's mansion—that's it in the center, looking brand-new, and built of dazzling white limestone.

  I walked clear up to the Seventies, alongside Central Park, before turning back; I was in the area of small truck farms again, still largely unbuilt upon, and I knew from yesterday's sleigh ride that there was nothing much ahead but more and more open country.

  For variety on the way back, I walked over a block to Madison Avenue, turned south to walk back, and at Seventy-first Street I stopped and took the following, once again because—I'm not sure why this interested me so—I felt sure the farmhouse was a colonial relic still in use on Manhattan Island. That's the Museum of Natural History off there across Central Park, very clearly visible from here at the corner of Seventy-first Street and Madison Avenue of a strangely rural New York City.

  I had one plate left, and I used it down in the Forties, back in the built-up city again, and, for me anyway, it's the best of all. Madison was a far quieter street than Fifth, but like Fifth it had been promptly cleared of yesterday's snow, and every single stoop and inch of sidewalk—all these houses had servants, I'm certain—was long since shoveled and swept clean.

  It was so quiet I could hear my own footsteps, and in the afternoon warmth of this brief late January thaw, feeling the clear sunny air on my face—the sky almost entirely blue now—I strolled along that peaceful, residential long-ago Madison Avenue momentarily as happy as I've ever been. At Forty-first Street a set of stone pillars flanking the stairs to a brownstone was flat on the tops, and I set Felix's camera on one of them. Taking my time then, focusing carefully, I took a picture that for me captures the quality I've tried to describe, of peace and tranquillity and better times. Here it is: Forty-first Street and Madison Avenue, an utterly different place and world in the latter twentieth century. But I like it this way. I took my picture and walked on, and I can still hear the clip-clop behind me of the horse-drawn car you can see in the middle distance, and the footsteps on that cut-stone walk of the long-skirted woman under the umbrella a block away. In those moments, the moments of this picture, I was in the one place in all the world that I wanted to be.

  And then, like a computer finally producing the right card, my mind said, How? How will you make Julia break her engagement? How can you explain what you know about Jake? And there was no answer. I began walking faster as though that would help, down toward Gramercy Park and Julia. But I slowed again. It was an easy decision last night, but now: What in the hell could I say to her? Don't ask any questions, but... Julia, just take my word for this, but you can't marry ... Please don't ask me to explain, but...

  In the parlor at 19 Gramercy Park before dinner—the day ending, a winter chill coming back into the air with the beginning darkness—I sat with Byron and Felix, trading sections of Felix's Evening Sun; Felix was delighted that I'd used his camera, flatly refused to accept payment for the plates I'd used, and said he'd develop and print them after supper. Maud Torrence came down, and finally Jake; Aunt Ada and Julia were setting the table in the dining room, and Julia twice caught me staring at her as I sat wondering how I could possibly do what I had to do.

  I began to get mad. Looking over at Jake who was sitting by the big nickel-plated stove reading his paper, or trying to—he kept glancing up as though it were hard to sit still, frowning, and twice he wet his lips—I knew I would not, would not, let him marry Julia. And I didn't know how to stop it.

  At the table during dinner he was almost directly across from me, and I wanted to needle him, wanted to get at him; I couldn't help it. Maud Torrence was talking about a Professor Peirce who had just read a paper before the New York Academy of Sciences on the advantages of establishing national and international time zones. Listening, I discovered there was no standardization of times anywhere in the country or world; any little town was free to pick its own time and often did, so that the time in towns a few miles apart might vary; eleven minutes maybe, or seventeen, or thirty-one. Railroad stations had clocks showing the times in different places, and Byron remarked that railroad timetables on long east-west trips were almost impossible to write because there were some seventy-odd different times used in the places the trains went through. Professor Peirce suggested time zones to be called Atlantic Time, Mississippi Time, Rocky Mountain Time, and Pacific Time, and I considered making a prediction but I was more interested in Jake.

  And when Maud finished I said, truthfully, "I was up at the Central Park today, and"—a lie—"I was talking to a man who said he thought he'd seen Inspector Byrnes ride through a little earlier. He sounded as though he'd seen"—I almost said a celebrity but suddenly doubted that the wor
d existed yet—"an important personage. Who is this Inspector Byrnes?"

  It worked just fine: Jake's mouth clamped so tightly shut that his mustache and beard merged, and his eyes turned hard as he flicked a glance at me. As usual when you try something mean and succeed there wasn't really much triumph in it. I felt a little low and unworthy, not pleased with myself, yet with a little room left for a kind of sneaky gladness. Because the topic sprang to life; at least three people had answered simultaneously, and it was obvious that the name "Inspector Byrnes" had a powerful magic.

  "That man!" Aunt Ada said, her eyes flashing with disapproval. Maud was murmuring something I couldn't hear except for the word "disgraceful." And Byron had said, "Well, I'll tell you," and he did. "He may not follow the letter of the law all the time"—Byron had put down knife and fork both, leaning over the tabletop, he was so interested in his own words—"but you can't kick about that; he gets results! He's got the pickpockets on the run! And the bank robbers. Isn't that right, Jake?"

  Jake had gotten out a cigar, and though he didn't light it at the table, he sat chewing it, rolling it in his mouth, not even pretending to eat anymore. He didn't answer Byron, just nodded shortly.

  "He invented the third degree," Felix told me, anxious to exhibit his knowledge.

  "That's hardly to his credit!" said Aunt Ada.

  Maud said anxiously, "It means beating people, doesn't it?"

  Julia hadn't said anything, and I glanced at her to find that she was watching me, her eyes curious, speculative. It occurred to me that she might have realized something of what I was doing in bringing up Byrnes. I just grinned at her, not denying it, if that's what she was thinking.