Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  "To the body with Julia tattooed across the chest."

  She nodded. "Yes. So she washed, dressed and laid him out alone: No one else was to see that tattoo."

  I had the blue envelope in my hand, and I gave it a last look, then handed it back to Kate, and took the little snapshot she held. Again I stared down at the clear sharp image of the tombstone under which Mrs. Andrew Carmody had finally laid Jake. No name on it; she'd live with him as her husband but she wouldn't bury him that way. There on the face of the stone outside Gillis, Montana, were the dots, the time-eroded pits forming a nine-pointed star in a circle. Only now it no longer looked like a tombstone. Rounded at the top, the sides straight, the short little stone looked to me as it had looked to the woman who ordered it made: It was Jake Pickering's boot heel in stone, the final touch to the melodrama of his nineteenth-century life.

  Kate put her folder away, she poured our coffee, we sat sipping it, talking, waiting till what had to be said was spoken. And presently I said it, clumsily. "It hasn't worked out for us, has it, Kate?"

  She said, "No. I don't know why. Do you?"

  I shook my head. "I thought it was going to; I was sure of that. But it reached the point when it ought to have..."

  She didn't want to go on about it. "And it didn't. Well. It happens, Si. What else can be said? It's not a matter of fault; it can't be forced. Don't blame yourself."

  We talked much more, of course; quite a lot, surprisingly, even laughing at things that had happened in the past. And when I left, finally, I think we felt pretty good about each other, and I knew that when some time had passed, our new relationship an old fact, I'd be pleased if I saw Katie again someday.

  On the walk home, the doubts struck, and everything turned bleak. Was it possible for me to go back and live out my life with Julia? Could I do that, knowing the future? Could I live in nineteenth-century New York and look at infants in their carriages, knowing what lay ahead for them? It was a vanished world, actually, nearly every soul in it long since dead: Could I ever really join it?

  During the next week I let the question lie in the back of my mind, not trying to force an answer. Instead, I finished up several sketches and began this account, working steadily and rapidly in longhand since I had no typewriter, stopping for meals and taking a walk now and then, but not doing much else. In an oblique way it was helping me think what to do, my mind on what mattered yet not directly. Occasionally I thought about Rube Prien, and was amused; if he knew what I was doing he'd want every page stamped CLASSIFIED—or, better yet, burned. Which is what I'd have to do with it unless I joined Julia and took it with me. I have a friend, a writer, and I'm very certain he is the only man ever to look through a great decaying stack of ancient religious pamphlets in the rare-book section of the New York Public Library. If I were to join Julia, I could finish this, I thought, and then whenever it was—1911?—that the library was built, I could place this where I knew he'd come onto it someday. Sitting at my kitchen table working, I smiled, liking the idea; it gave the feeling, at least, of a little further purpose to the doing of it. But the real purpose wasn't achieved; the question in my mind didn't answer itself.

  Rube phoned each day, and dropped in on me twice during that week. He was careful to phone first to avoid any appearance of checking up on me, which was just what he was doing, of course. Each time we talked I took the trouble to let him know I hadn't changed my mind.

  On the last day I phoned Dr. Danziger. He was in the book, and he answered on the fifth ring, just as I was thinking of hanging up, my conscience clear. As we spoke I wished I'd hung up one ring sooner because, in the mysterious way that this sometimes happens, he'd suddenly turned old, I realized, and I was relieved not to see him. His voice had a quaver now, he was old and beaten, and it struck me with the force of certain knowledge that he was living the very last of his life. I told him what Esterhazy and Rube had told me—he insisted; and I thought he deserved that knowledge if he wanted it. He hadn't known, nobody had told him. And he was so disturbed, his voice trembling almost to breaking, that I was horribly afraid he might actually cry but of course he did not. I should have known he wouldn't; he was old suddenly and very likely dying, but this wasn't a man to let himself change that much. He was angry. "Stop them!" he cried, his voice tiny in the receiver at my car. "You've got to stop them! Promise it, Si! Say you'll stop them!" And of course I said yes, I certainly would, listening to my own voice, hoping it sounded as though I really meant it.

  A week after my return I was back in the Dakota, back in the clothes that seemed almost more natural to me now than those I'd left behind in my apartment. I'd spent last night here and most of this next day, not because I any longer needed them to reach the state of mind necessary to step out into what I thought of now as Julia's time. It was because I was even more alone here than I'd been in my apartment, and more free to try to think through the most important decision I'd ever make, here in a limbo between two worlds and times.

  It didn't snow but it was a drab February sky all day, visibility low, as though it might snow soon. And finally, well after dark this time, I walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, and turned toward the street and the park just ahead. There were cars on the street, their tires sounding wetly on the pavement, and I stood waiting at the curb. Then the traffic light clicked green, and I crossed, walked far into the park, found a bench to myself and sat down. I waited then, deep in the park, in the silence, and—simply allowed the change to happen, almost to accumulate. And when finally I stood up, looking around me at the bare trees visible by the light of the night sky reflected from the snow, the park looked no different. But I knew where I was with absolute certainty, and when once again I walked out onto Fifth Avenue, a light delivery wagon rattled slowly by, the horse tired, his neck slumped, a kerosene lantern swaying under the rear axle. On the walk a woman in a feathered black hat, a fur cape over her shoulders, walked past me, holding her long dark skirt an inch above the wet paving stones.

  I turned south, down narrow, quiet residential Fifth Avenue, glancing into yellow-lighted windows as I walked, catching glimpses: of a bald bearded man reading the evening paper, the light from a fireplace I couldn't see reflected redly on the windowpane; of a white-aproned, white-capped maid passing through a room; of a month-old Christmas tree, a woman touching a lighted taper to its candles for the pleasure of the five-year-old boy beside her.

  I walked a long way, not thinking but just waiting to see what I felt. Then I stood across the street beside the iron railings of the park fence staring over at the tall lighted windows of 19 Gramercy Park. I stood for some minutes, and once someone passed quickly by a lower front window, I couldn't tell who. I stood till I was cold, my feet numbing. But I didn't go in; after a while I walked quickly away.

  And then, north on Broadway from Madison Square, I walked along the Rialto, the theatrical section of New York when Broadway was Broadway. The street was jammed with newly washed and polished carriages. The sidewalks were alive with people, at least half of them in evening dress, the night filled with the sound of them, and the feel of excitement and imminent pleasure hung in the air.

  But I wasn't a part of it. I hurried past the lighted theaters, restaurants, and great hotels, until I reached the Gilsey House between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth. There, at the lobby cigar counter, I bought a cigar, a long thin cheroot, and tucked it carefully into the breast pocket of my inner coat. Outside I crossed Thirtieth Street, and stopped before a theater that looked and was brand-new: Wallack's. THE MONEY SPINNERS, said the big block letters of the printed signs beside the entrances. Just ahead of me a man carrying a silver-headed cane collapsed his opera hat, then held open a lobby door for the girl with him. They walked in, and I followed, stepping into a lobby so magnificent it was overpowering. It was all dark blue and maroon velvet, gilt and silver ornamentation, dark polished wood, and ornate chandeliers. Twin staircases, one at each end of the lobby, curved up to the balconies. I walked over to the
ticket window, before which stood a short line, and read the framed price schedule beside it: PARQUET ORCHESTRA OR ALL DOWN STAIRS, $1.50. DRESS CIRCLE FIRST ROW, $2.00, SECOND AND THIRD ROWS, $1.50; NEXT FIVE ROWS $1.00; NEXT ROWS, 75¢ AND 50¢.

  I glanced out through the glass door panels then; the woman I was waiting for still wasn't there, and I stood to one side by a wall, listening to the excited hum of the lobby, but apart from it. Minutes passed, maybe four or five; then I saw her, back bent, feet shuffling. She was white-haired, wearing a buttonless man's overcoat tied at the waist with a rope, her shoes split at the sides, a rag of a scarf tied under her chin. On one arm she carried a small basket two-thirds filled with polished red apples, and she stopped in the middle of the walk and began an endless cackling spiel: "Apples, apples, apples. Get your apples, get 'em now. Apples, apples, Apple Mary's best! Hurry, now, hurry. Apple Mary says hurry." I stood watching; only one man of the three or four that I saw hand her a coin actually took an apple, and he didn't come into the theater but walked on, eating it. The others came in or stood on the walk.

  Carriages had been steadily dropping off their parties at the curb. Now another stopped, and a family got out, all in evening dress: a bearded father, a ruby stud in his stiff white shirtfront; the mother, a pleasantly smiling woman in pink dress and gray cloak; and two girls, one in her twenties, the other younger. Each girl carried her cloak folded over an arm, shoulders bare; one wore a gray dress trimmed with red bows, and the younger wore a marvelous velvet gown of untrimmed, unrelieved spring-green velvet. When she smiled, as she did now, passing through the door her father held open for the party, she was lovely.

  In the lobby they met friends, and now they stood talking, laughing, and I wanted to eavesdrop but couldn't: I stood staring out at Apple Mary chanting on the walk. And in less than a minute here he came, in evening dress, clean-shaven except for a mustache, moving deftly through the groups on the walk, a slim, very tall, handsome man in his twenties. The lobby doors beside me opened and closed steadily, and as he stopped out on the walk beside Apple Mary I heard him speak the words I could almost repeat with him. "Here you are, Mary. Good luck for you and good luck for me!" and I saw the wink of gold as the coin dropped into her hand. She stared at her palm, then looked up at him. "Bless you, sir; oh, bless you!" she said aloud, and then my lips moved silently, almost in unison with hers. "This evening will be blessed for you; mark my words!"

  I glanced quickly to my left. The family party were saying goodbye to their friends, turning slowly toward the staircase as their friends turned toward the main-floor doors. And the man I'd watched on the sidewalk was striding toward my door, his hand reaching out for the handle. My own hand was lifting from the breast pocket of my suit coat, the other pushed open the door. I said, "Excuse me, sir," smiling, blocking his way, and I slowly raised the cigar in my hand to my mouth. "But do you have a light?"

  "Certainly." He brought out a match, lifted one foot to strike it on the dry part of the sole, then raised the sputtering match, shielding it with one hand, to my cigar. Sick at heart, I ducked my head, unable to meet his eyes, and puffed my cigar into light.

  "Thank you," I said then; from a corner of my eye I could see the far stairway to the balcony, and the girl in the pale green dress was climbing it. "You're welcome"—the man just outside the door shook out the match, then stepped past me into the lobby, glancing around it. But there was nothing now to catch his interest. On the staircase there was a last flick of pale green velvet but I don't think he even noticed it. Taking a ticket from his white vest pocket, he crossed the lobby on into the theater.

  As I walked along the dark side-street east of Broadway, my hands shoved into my overcoat pockets, it was queer to realize that if I were again to—though I knew I would not—walk into the great brick warehouse labeled Beekey's, it would be into an interior of six concrete floors filled with stored household goods, nothing else. And that if, through the army, I were to track down a major named Ruben Prien, I might eventually find him, a tough little former football player with a wonderful smile. He'd be at a desk somewhere, in his neat khaki uniform, planning in absolute good faith and with an utter certainty God knows what terrible mischief. And he wouldn't know me at all.

  To Dr. Danziger, on the phone, I'd repeated as a promise the decision I'd made on the day I confronted Rube Prien and Esterhazy. Now I'd just kept my promise. And the man—the facial resemblance had been very strong—who would have become Dr. Danziger's father, and the girl in green who in time would have become his mother, now never would be.

  But these were thoughts that weren't of my time anymore. Now they were of a far-off future I no longer belonged in. I touched the unfinished manuscript in my overcoat pocket, and looked around at the world I was in. At the gaslighted brownstones beside me. At the nighttime winter sky. This, too, was an imperfect world, but—I drew a deep breath, sharply chill in my lungs—the air was still clean. The rivers flowed fresh, as they had since time began. And the first of the terrible corrupting wars still lay decades ahead. I reached Lexington Avenue, turned south and—the yellow lights of Gramercy Park waiting at the end of the street—I walked on toward Number 19.

  A Footnote

  I've tried to be factually accurate in this story. Horse cars really ran where Si rode them; El stations actually were located where he got on and off trains; the things he saw in the lobby of the old Astor House were really there; quotations from newspapers he read are verbatim; and the arm of the Statue of Liberty did indeed stand in Madison Square, a truth that especially pleases me. Occasionally my efforts at accuracy became compulsive, as in my account of the World Building fire and events just preceding it, in which I became obsessed with getting times of day and exact details of changing weather during the fire, and names of tenants and even the room numbers of that unmemorable old wreck of a building correct or close to it. I even tell myself that my fictional solution to the mystery of that forgotten fire's origins blends so well with the known facts that it might have been accepted as truth at the time. This kind of research becomes time-wasting foolishness, but fun.

  I haven't let accuracy interfere with the story, though. If I needed a fine old Dakota apartment building in 1882, and found it wasn't finished till 1885, I just moved it back a little; sue me. So there are some deliberate inaccuracies, and maybe even an outright error or two; it's only a story, offered only as entertainment. But—with the enormous help of Warren Brown and Lenore Redstone, who did a great deal of knowledgeable, imaginative research—I doubt that I made too many.

  Si's photographs and sketches were not, of course, products of his own hand. Many of the best illustrations were searched out with endless patience, kindness, and intelligent judgment by Miss Charlotte La Rue of the Museum of the City of New York. Others were kindly lent to me by Brown Brothers ; by Culver Pictures, Inc. ; by the Home Insurance Company ; by the Museum of the City of New York ; and by The New-York Historical Society, New York City. The photographs and sketches represent the time pretty well, I think, even though they couldn't all be strictly of the eighteen-eighties. Before 1900 things didn't change so fast as now—one more reason why Si so wisely decided to stay back there.

  J.F.