From Time to Time (17 page)

I spent the day looking at these old clothes, and thinking about them. Most of the next day I spent back at the exhibit, and most of the morning of the third. I did what Martin Lastvogel had once taught me at the Project school: I stared at the closeness of these dresses and cloaks and shoes and parasols; at the hats and caps, overcoats and suits and Norfolk jackets, and the shoes and boots and galoshes, until . . . finally the strangeness left them. It took work: Other visitors came and looked and commented and left, but I walked up and down the aisles between cases, and stopped and stood working at seeing these things on city streets. Worked at seeing them, in my mind, passing by on a sidewalk. Worked at seeing them not here on display but in use . . . until sometime during the third day they had turned no longer strange but ordinary. And when I left, and walked out and down the steps of the museum into modern-day New York. . . I knew I'd come closer to, could truly sense all around me now, somehow just behind and under what I could see-the actuality of Albert Einstein's simultaneously existing past, the New York of the younger century, now very nearly attainable.

CHAPTER 13

ONE DAY IN MY ROOM, leafing through The American Boy magazine of January 1912, I understood that I was ready. I sat slouched in a big upholstered chair by my windows to bring the afternoon light onto the pages, wearing jeans and a plaid cotton shirt. And understood that my preparations were finished. I didn't begin to know all about the New York City of 1912, but neither does a man of today fully know his own time and place. I knew enough. In this moment of the present, I knew what you always have to know, have to believe, and above all have to feel: that another New York was here too, lying invisibly all around me.

Below my window, and just across the street, lay Central Park. Looking out now across its treetops, I could see in my mind its paths, bridges, rocks, water, all virtually unchanged from century to century. It existed out there now just as it existed for Julia and Willy. And existed in a moment like this of the late winter of 1912. The Park, little changed, was part of each day in New York for more than a century past, a Gateway to each. And I stood up, and began to get dressed.

The clothes had been hanging in my closet for nearly a week; I'd found the package in my room one night in a Brooks Brothers suit box sent Hf) b~ Rube: a complete outfit, including underwear a wallet, even a handkerchief. Now I stripped down and got into the underwear, an odd one-piece affair that actually buttoned up the front. Then socks, which had a pair of Paris garters already attached. Money belt of lightweight tan canvas, packed and heavy, gold and the old-style large bills in big denominations, some of them one-thousands. I took out a hundred dollars for my wallet, then strapped on the belt; it made me a little nervous. Then a green-and-white-striped shirt, and a stiff detached collar. Two gold-plated studs already in the shirt band. Attaching the collar was something I knew all about: First tuck the tie up into the fold of the collar all around. Fasten the collar to the shirt at the back stud. Put on shirt and collar, and close collar at front with the stud there. Then tie the tie.

In the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror. The collar was higher than I was used to; it actually touched my jaw at both sides, a little uncomfortable and looked it.

Shoes now: light brown, almost yellow oxfords with funny wide shoestrings, widening out like little ribbons near the tips; blunt toes bulging upward. My size and width; Rube had asked me. And not quite new: broken in, and I wondered where he'd gotten them. Pants next, the cuffs so narrow I had to take off the shoes to pull on the pants. Vest and jacket finally, the suit a nice shade of tan. Tan porkpie hat. Then to the bathroom mirror again.

Not bad. I liked it, and knew it was right for the time. The pants had a watch pocket for the gold watch Rube had supplied, wrapped and labeled Careful, in the Brooks Brothers box. I put the handkerchief, white with a blue border, in my back pocket. And finally, into the right-hand pants pocket, a little handful of coins from the plastic sack Rube had wrapped them in. I checked; none was dated after 1911.

Everything else I owned went into my modern soft-sided bag. I'd already arranged with the hotel to check it when I was ready, until I "returned from a trip. At the mirror a last grin at the stranger with my face; then I picked up my room key and bag.

Across Fifty-ninth Street and into Central Park. Then I walked not quite aimlessly but not quite knowing where I was going either, turning at whim onto branching-off pathways, deliberately losing myself. Behind me on the asphalt-paved path, the fast click of high heels, and a young woman hurried past me; getting a bit late to be caught alone in Central Park.

Presently, wandering, I came to what I was looking for, a bench deep in the Park so surrounded by heavy-leafed, late-summer trees and shrubbery, and with a long gently rising hillock before me, that the city was gone. Directly ahead through a high gap in the trees, I could see the western sky, and a very few thinned-out fragmenting clouds tinged by the lowering sun.

I didn't work at what I had come here to do. Just sat there on my bench, legs stretched out, ankles crossed; not thinking really, but not trying not to either. Just sat staring absently down at my bulge-toed shoes. At the Project we'd been trained in selfhypnosis, necessary, Danziger believed, in order to break the billions of tiny mental threads, as he called them, that hold the mind and consciousness to its own present. They are in truly countless things, the endless facts, large and trivial, the truths and illusions and thoughts that tell us that this is what for us is now.

But long since, I'd learned that I no longer needed hypnosis. I did-well, what was it I did? I'd learned the almost indescribable mental trick of allowing that immense body of knowledge that means and is the present . . . to go still in my mind. Just sat there deep in the Park waiting-in the way I had learned-to feel it all finally go quiescent. Sitting there, elbows comfortably winged out on the back of the bench, watching the first hint of evening begin to gather at ground level, still afternoon in the sky, I may have drifted into a kind of trance. But still, I heard the present hidden around me; heard a cab horn scream; heard a whispering jet very high and distant.

But then no more, and I sat letting thoughts and impressions move through my mind of an earlier New York of this century, the New York of early 1912. I knew as simple fact that all around me 1912 truly existed, was there to be found. And didn't force. Just waited to begin feeling it in strength.

I watched the sky, saw the treetops lose all but the very last of the sun, the high-up blue darkening toward evening. An old phrase from somewhere spoke itself in my mind, and I murmured it to myself- l'heure bleu, the blue hour. I'd never seen it before but now the sky and, truly, the air itself as I sat here watching had acquired a lovely haunting blueness. And with this blue dusk there had come, strangely and thrillingly, a kind of pleasurable melan choly. To me at least, it's what the blue hour meant, the exciting sad-sweet knowledge that all over the city that lay somewhere around me, lights were coming on in 1912 in high-up windows, city people beginning to prepare for gathering in special places for the special times the blue hour promises. L'heure bleu: not every night anywhere. And in most places never. But now in this beginning Manhattan evening I could feel it powerfully present, a lovely lonely joy with a promise possible only just here and just now and in the moments to follow, all around and close by, just ahead somewhere if I would simply rise and walk through the cooling blue dusk out into it.

I didn't hurry, just stood and began to walk, following the windings of the path, moving more or less toward Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. Before I reached them I heard what for me became forever the sound of the blue hour. A gay brassy sound, not electronic but-my ears knew this-a real sound made by the actual squeezing of a fat rubber bulb mounted on a wide running board beside an out-in-the-open driver. Hohn-nk! it said like a trumpet call, then gloriously sounded again, and I grinned and began to hurry.

No surprise to turn a last curve of the path and suddenly see the Plaza standing alone once again against the blue-hour sky. No surprise to walk out onto Fifth Avenue and see the street lying once more in its old narrow width. No surprise as I walked ahead toward Fifty-ninth Street to see all traffic lights vanished. And then to stop on the curb and see the big boxy taxicabs-passenger seats enclosed, drivers out alone under a little canopy-parked down at the Plaza's Fifty-ninth Street entrance. It did startle me to look across the street and see that the fountain before the Plaza didn't yet exist. But to my left directly across the street General Sherman sat in the blue dusk unchanged on his big gilded horse.

The hotel looked the same, I thought standing there at the curl), my eyes moving up along its sides-except that now nothing around it stood higher than the Plaza. I stood looking up at the scatter of room lights across its side, more coming on as I watched. Directly across Fifth from the Plaza, the room lights of another great hotel, and of still a third catercorner across from the Plaza. This cluster of great hotels coming to life here in the new dusk seemed thrilling to me, and I stood watching more and more of their rooms spring into yellow squares against the slowly darkening sky of Manhattan. In the almost spring of 1912. In l'heure bleu. Then three wonderful things happened almost simultaneously.

I saw a cab-a tall red box behind a driver at a nearly upright wheel-pull into the curb at the Plaza's Fifty-ninth Street entrance. Before it had fully stopped, its rear door opened over the curb, and a girl-hardly having to stoop, the cab roof was so high walked out; ran out, really, and across the walk. A smiling happy girl in a wide, wide hat and a long slim pale dress, a hand reaching down to pluck up its hem as her foot touched the stairs.

As this excited girl reached the top of the stairs someone inside opened and held the door for her, and I heard music from inside, a strange-sounding orchestra, piano and violin very strong-music with a fast, almost modern beat. And in the moment of hearing this sudden music and of seeing the girl step into the hotel, another thing happened. The red cab chugging out into the street again, I saw the driver's gauntleted hand squeeze the plump bulb beside him, heard the happy hohnnk! . . . and precisely in that instant, the brassy sound still sounding through the blue dusk, all the streetlamps along Fifty-ninth and down Fifth silently blossomed into light, and a rush of dizzying pleasure moved up through me, and I stepped out to cross the street toward the Plaza, toward the music, toward whatever waited for me now.

CHAPTER 14

I CROSSED FIFTY-NINTH STREET, only three slow-moving automobiles chugging harmlessly toward me, and the distant electric eye of a cable car. No Fifth Avenue entrance to the Plaza that I could see; the familiar pillars, yes, but plate glass between them, behind them a glittering restaurant, everyone in evening dress.

So into the Plaza at Fifty-ninth Street; then I followed the music down a carpeted corridor to The Tea Room, and my sketch here is

my memory of what I saw. It was wild, a quartet somewhere hack there pounding out the ragtime beat: piano, trumpet, violin, and a harp plucked and swiped at by a shoulder-swaying lady in a long lavender dress. The men in suits, ties, vests, and nearly every woman wore a hat-big hats with big brims, or headbands, one of them sporting a two-foot-high ostrich feather rising straight up from the woman's forehead, jiggling steadily-I could follow it moving around the floor.

Standing there watching, listening, grinning, I knew the words of this music, but . . . what were these people doing? Because they were moving to the beat all right, really moving, shoulders, arms, hips, feet, and wagging heads. But in my sketch I've tried to show' how some women-like the one in the foreground-held their left arms oddly, hand on hip hut with the elbow swung around to point straight forward. Others, like the woman at the left, let their forearms dangle limp. Occasionally a man bent his partner far back, nearly horizontal.

Abruptly the music ended: See that ragtime couple over there, I stood mentally singing along, see them throw their feet-and they did, everyone abruptly kicking one foot back-up in the air! Suddenly everyone joined in singing the final words aloud: "It's a bear, it's a bear, and now they yelled it, "IT'S A BEAR! The music stopped and every dancer out there hunched shoulders and, feet shuffling waddled off the floor, grinning, in imitation, I realized, of a walking bear. It was something.