Infinity's Daughter (8 page)

November of 1928 was especially cold. It was the first year where I began to feel myself aging. My bones felt brittle, which I imagine was due to the temperature, and I began to worry, that winter, about what would happen to me, or how long I would live. I knew that people in my first time lived significantly longer than they did in my new era. This didn’t give me much hope, but all I could really hope for was my family’s longevity, and my love for my family to pull me through. But despite my years, I was still happy with my body. Childbirth had tugged at my stomach, and hastened the widening of my hips, but I had retained my figure, and my knowledge of health from the future had aided me in retaining a relatively youthful appearance. I thought this was appropriate; a time-traveler becomes timeless in their own right.

Susan was a blossoming young woman, and newly an adult. She was out with her friends for a gathering, at one of these young parties packed with short skirts, fast cars and cocktails. I knew Susan was smart enough not to get into trouble, and to make wise decisions. But thinking back to my cavorting around with Becky and our plans for senior prom, I could only presume that it wasn’t all innocence and virtue.

And Susan had a boyfriend now, too. His name was Todd. I couldn’t help but think back to my own years when I was young with Sam, and we were so in love. We still were, but it was different back then. Everything was so new, and I was still so new to the time. There was an excitement that didn’t exist anymore, and a newness that felt tender to the touch, with rushes and tingles. I couldn’t believe that it had been twenty years since my marriage to Sam. And I had a feeling that I would now soon be watching my own daughter, my precious little Susan, step off into the world on her own, with her own man to provide for her.

One evening while Susan was out on the town with her friends, Sam and I sat quietly together listening to a radio program. I had gotten quite accustomed to not having television, or any form of visual media. At first I hated it, but eventually, I came to rather like it. The strain on my vision was incomparable, and it left many things to the imagination. After the war, Sam and I had begun to have nightly radio dates. We would sit together and listen to the updates on the progress of the war, and eventually on the recovery. It became habitual, and it was now a time for us to relax, and enjoy one another’s company. I was wearing a wool shawl and my nightgown, and Sam was bundled up in a sweater I had knitted him for Christmas the previous year. We were huddled together on the couch in front of the fire to keep away the chills, listening to the evening’s stories and news.

It was then that a very surprising ad popped up on the broadcast.
Mickey Mouse makes his debut performance in Steamboat Willie
. I sat up, excited as my neurons flashed with recognition and déjà vu. Sam looked at me, surprised. It had been so long since the day I appeared naked and cold in this new era, that I was no longer surprised about the extreme variations, and was very accustomed to, and almost preferred, this way of life. I didn’t even have to pretend anymore that I didn’t know what was coming. I certainly still remembered my history, but I was so wrapped up in my day-to-day life, that I didn’t have to try very hard anymore to suppress my knowledge of the future, or feign ignorance of things I already knew. But this, this was certainly a surprise. I had almost forgotten about the existence of Mickey Mouse—he was not something I reminisced about often, and quite frankly had misplaced him in my memory. But at the mention in that advertisement, I shot up, and Sam could see the recognition in my eyes, the familiarity behind them, the longing for something I had been missing.

My heart felt heavy, and the memories of Mickey Mouse, and his long influence on my childhood brought me back to the memories of my family, and my friends, and the thoughts of where they were or what was happening to them in the future.

Sam touched my forehead. “Lucy, what is it? Have you heard about this?”

I sighed, suppressing tears. Sam could tell, and pulled me close, his face troubled.

“I think I saw a flyer about it in the park,” I lied, “It’s supposed to be a wonderful film.”

It was then that the tears came. Images of my little house and my parents rippled across my brain, filling me with a, warmth I hadn’t felt in years. I was overwhelmed.

“Sam,” I said, “We have to go and see it.” I sniffled, and wiped the tears from my eyes.

Sam still looked very confused, and apprehensive. He hadn’t seen me like this in quite some time. My moments of clarity and recognition, and deception to hide my knowledge had fluttered away, but I knew he could tell I was lying, and I knew he remembered from when he first met me. I was new in this time, and he could sense that I was different from most girls my age. And he loved me for it.

But he never questioned me, and he never bothered me about it. He smiled, the corners of his mouth curling up, and the wrinkles deepening around his eyes. He ran his hand through my hair, and looked into my face. “Of course,” he said, “If you want to go, we will take Susan and Todd and all go out together.”

I smiled and squeezed his hand. “Thank you.”

A few days later, Susan, Todd, Sam and I all piled together in our state of the art 1925 Flint, and headed out to the theatre. Todd was a very nice boy, and we had spent a decent amount of time with him, getting to know him and welcoming him into our family. I couldn’t help but notice how much he loved Susan, and how dedicated he was to her. It made me smile, and made me happy. I knew that if she were to marry him, she would be well taken care of.

The little Flint zipped down the streets of Manhattan, taking us to the Colony Theatre. There was no snow on the ground, but it was more than a crisp evening, with little leaves of ice decorating the pavement. I was wearing a mink-lined coat, and Sam was in his thick tweed jacket. Susan looked beautiful in a lengthy black dress that slipped out underneath her long coat, with tiny pearls from Todd shimmering out from around her collar in the glow of the streetlights.

We parked a block away from the theatre, and walked the extra distance in the callous night air. Sam put his arm around me and held my waist to make sure I didn’t slip on the tiny pockets of ice. It reminded me of our walks when I was pregnant with Susan and Edward. I couldn’t believe it was my own child that walked in front of me as I watched Susan parade down the street elegantly on Todd’s arm. Time traveling was a shock, but the sheer power of time passing is enough to make you shiver.

The show was enjoyable enough. Sam, Susan and Todd were all mesmerized. We had all seen silent films before, but to see something animated was an entirely different experience. They all remarked about the marvel of the technology and the artistry, and how nothing like this had been accomplished to date. And it was true. I, myself, was more stunned by how unmoved I was by the entire thing. It was like watching the old black and white movies when I was a child. It was remarkable to see that period in history, and to be in the room while everyone experienced the magic of Mickey Mouse for the first time. Unsurprisingly, I found the film archaic, and yet I was surprised at myself for not being more excited about the magnitude of the film and appreciating this moment in history. Instead, I felt my heartache return, and a wave of sadness sweep over me as my book-marked memories of my past life whispered remembrances in my ear. Among the laughter and joy, I sat quietly in repose.

But we weren’t really there for Steam Boat Willie, or Mickey Mouse. Sam saw my face, and grabbed my hand, reminding me of the real reason we were out on the town with my beautiful daughter and her handsome beau. Just a few days after I heard the advertisement on the radio with Sam, Todd showed up at our doorstep one evening when Susan was out with her girlfriends.

Todd was one of the most genuine people I had ever met. His family had just arrived in America from Italy when he was an infant, making the long journey across the sea on a big ocean freighter. I couldn’t even fathom something like that, let alone the perseverance it took to become successful in the early days of twentieth century America, as a young immigrant. But Todd had done it. His English was very good, and sad as it was—the discrimination was something that cut me to the core about this era, but was something I had to learn to live with—he had fairer skin and had changed his name to Todd to sound more American. He was able to pass by with little persecution and harassment from white, British-rooted Americans, and had made his way up the ladder to a position in the police force, just like Sam. His determination and kind heart, despite everything he had faced was more than admirable. His heart went out to help everyone he met, and he took his job very seriously and diligently. But when he met Susan, he gave his heart away to her. She was the love of his life, and Sam and I had no doubts about his ability or desire to care for her and provide for her in sickness and in health. He could give her the life and the support I wanted for her. And she loved him deeply, too.

So, when Todd appeared at our doorstep to ask for our daughter’s hand in marriage, no one was surprised. Tears leapt from my eyes, and Sam caught a wisp and hugged Todd fiercely, sniffling and wiping his eyes. Susan Kay Russo. This would be her new name, and her new family. Everything happened for a reason.

Our night all together, out on the town, was for Todd’s proposal to Susan. Though I’m sure she must have had some idea, Susan could never have guessed that Todd would propose to her that evening. It is one of my most cherished moments, and one of our happiest nights as a family.

After the film, we all headed to dinner at a lovely French restaurant in Upper Manhattan. The lighting was very romantic, and Sam held my hand while we waited for the food, sipping wine and knowing what was to come. I watched Susan gaze longingly and comfortable into Todd’s eyes, and was so happy that my daughter had come to know love as I had. She was a successful career woman, too, very unusual for the era, but I couldn’t have been more proud. Susan had taken her studies very seriously—thanks to my lessons with her as a young child, I like to think, though I must also credit her tutor Mr. Brady. She had studied art history at Barnard College, and was now in an apprenticeship as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Todd held Susan’s hand, and we all laughed over dinner, the candle flames flickering softly against our breath. Dessert came out as delicate little lemon cakes complemented with mint leaves and berries resting gently on top. Before Susan picked up her dessert fork, Todd took her hand again, and raised his glass in the other to all of us, suggesting a toast. The toast was to Susan, and her success, and how grateful he was to have come into her life, and to come into our lives, knowing her family. He looked at her and told her how he had been saving everything he had to provide a home for her and their life together. Her eyes lit up in surprise. Then, I gasped when I saw him slide out of his chair, knowing what was happening next. Susan went white then, and tears rushed to her eyes before he was even down on one knee. He took the ring out of his pocket, and asked for her hand in marriage. Everyone in the restaurant stopped and stood, applauding their love. She said yes.

Just six months later, I watched Sam give Susan away. Bringing my children into the world were the happiest days of my life, but seeing Susan in tears at the altar with Todd was the most beautiful. She looked like an angel in her long white dress made of lace and accented with quaint little bows. Her wedding made me think of my own, with all of the officers from the force attending in their decorated uniforms, saluting the couple upon completing their vows. Sam stood beside me in his uniform, I held his arm and felt like I was watching our own wedding from the view of a spectator decades ago.

As they left the little church in the countryside where they held their wedding, the guests tossed confetti and flower petals in waves, decorating the sidewalk as they emerged man and wife. I had never seen Susan happier. Once again, my life felt complete. I had found purpose in my jaunt back a century, and wanted to be no other place in the world than there in that moment, next to my husband, watching my beautiful daughter and her handsome new husband start their life together. It was all worth it to bring her into the world, and help her create a life for herself. I looked up to the skies and thanked the powers that be, and hoped that my father, wherever he was, whatever time he might have been in or was traveling to, had forgiven me for my unrest, and knew that I loved him.

1928 had been such a joyous year, with Susan’s wedding, the peak of the roaring twenties, and the relief from the burden of the war that I almost forgot the significance of 1929 when the New Year rolled in. But the sick feeling I felt when I realized what was coming down the road did not let me forget my duties, and what I had been preparing for. Thank the Lord I had paid attention in my high school history courses. No one saw it coming, except me. For once, I was glad of my knowledge of the future, because it saved us from sinking along with everyone else. On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday hit Wall Street as investors traded some sixteen million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost almost instantaneously, wiping out thousands of investors.

As I remember it, stock prices had begun to decline in September and early October, but it was on October 18 that the steep fall into purgatory began. I began to get anxious, and told Sam to be careful with our money. On October 28, a Monday, there had been outrage as the prices plummeted into the ground. Everyone feared what would happen on Tuesday, but no one wanted to say it. On the morning of Black Tuesday, the papers were dark with the story of Monday’s smash. But surprising enough, the main content of the papers continued on as cheerful as ever. I shook my head, the sick feeling pooling in my stomach, as I knew what would be happening next. But the financiers denied it. The banks said that heavy buying had been sighted on the horizon, and brokers boasted about how the decline could not continue.

Before the collapse, panic ensued in the face of falling prices, and on October 29, Black Tuesday, the papers showed pictures of men in their suits, sweating and running like madman across the trading floors. Sheer panic ensued. It was so much worse living through it than I could have ever imagined. The complete and utter devastation that erupted among the entire nation was indescribable. People were terrified. And many were ruined. Suicides were not unexpected.

Sam was inundated at work. John, recently retired, was glad that he did so before the national panic ensued. However, when he and Adelle came over on weekends, John and Sam spent their time discussing the police effort, crowd control efforts, and even hardship among the officers of the force. No one was left untouched by the disaster.

Crime increased as the number of homeless, disenfranchised, and panicked citizens grew rapidly, angry about their predicament, and desperate for food, water, shelter and employment. No one knew what to do. It was more horrible than the history books told you, and worse than I ever could have imagined. Now that Susan was out of the house, I continued on my walks alone, or accompanied by Adelle or Susan on occasion when they came to visit. But I had begun to cut them short. The lines to the soup kitchens stretched out the doors and down the blocks. I saw pictures in the financial district and the Lower East Side where the unemployment lines are exponentially long, sometimes with street fights and riots. As I walked past people on the streets, I could see and feel their pain. I was ashamed to wear my finer dresses in public, and began to purposely dress down. The time worn faces, and those young but haggard from the sheer stress and shock of such an unanticipated and explosive event were indescribable. I saw women and children sitting on street corners, abandoned by their husbands through cowardice, circumstance, or the hands of suicide. Just a month after it happened, I sat down with Sam at the dinner table, and in a manner that I always did when I was about to allude to something in the future, I grabbed his hand firmly, fighting back tears, and told him that we had to be very, very careful. Things were about to get much worse. So much worse.

For about a decade, I had secretly saved every extra penny I had for the coming financial devastation. Sam and I hadn’t invested much, thanks to my encouragement, and had sold most of it before the collapse. Sam had told me once that I was ‘exuberant’ and maybe a little neurotic for all of my concern. But I wasn’t going to take any chances, and I knew it could save us. Whenever my little safe full of change had enough, I had exchanged it in for gold. The gold standard was the only thing that, as I knew, would be worth anything soon. By the time Black Tuesday hit, and America began its long road down to the Depression, I had enough gold stored up in the little safe in the closet to keep us afloat. I never told Sam what happened to me, or how I had lost my parents and came to live with the Sullivans. Not the real story. But there were moments like that; standing in our closet up at the top of our home in New York after the collapse, considering our savings, that he knew my foresight was more than just an intuition. He shook his head in disbelief at the entire situation, and wrapped his arms around my waist, holding me there between the safe and our racks of clothes.

I became incredibly impassioned after the Crash. I think part of it was Susan. She was such an intelligent girl, and she helped push me along the route to social justice, helping those who were less fortunate than us. Also, I felt it was the only thing I could do. It pained me just as much as it did when the war started that I couldn’t use my knowledge to stop any of this. I knew, as my father had told me, that no one must ever know. If they did find out, it could completely alter the course of history, possibly for the worse. I didn’t dare find out. So I stayed quiet, but I couldn’t help but feel desperately guilty as my world slid further and further into despair, that I should have been able to somehow prevent it. So, in my dismay, I joined forces with Susan, to help as many people as we could.

Adelle came out to help us too. She was incredible. First, we went through the entire house, sorting out anything we could spare, to give to those who were less fortunate, or sell to exchange as money to give to charities. Adelle convinced me to give up many of my excess possessions, including my finer coats and those pieces of jewelry I was less attached to.

“How much mink can one person have?” She laughed, folding up the coat, the little furs feathering out along the edges of the box as she placed them inside.

“Well, I apparently had too much,” I laughed. Susan smiled softly, but was overcome with grief about the entire ordeal. Her apprenticeship at the museum was on the line, but she couldn’t bear to leave. Even if she had to continue on a voluntary basis, she was devoted to her work.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling, “I’m just so worried about what will happen to the art works. I’m so scared they’ll have to sell them if the Met goes under, just to keep it afloat.” She was shaking her head. “But, in the meantime, while they decide what to do with me—what to do with any of us—I’m going to stay. I have to continue restoring the old works.” It was then that she started to tear up. “But we have to help everyone. If I think I have it bad I can’t even imagine what everyone else is going through; especially all of the immigrants in the Lower East Side. It’s horrific. And incredibly unjust.” She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. Adelle reached out and rubbed her back. “Thank you both,” Susan wept, “thank you so much for everything. We’re going to do all we can, and we’re going to pull through this.”

After that, we began to volunteer. Twice weekly, sometimes three times, we would head down to the soup kitchens in Midtown; on occasion we even spent time in some that were opening up in our own borough.

I often helped with the cooking, while Susan stood in the front lines, helping keep everyone organized or serving out the food. She was an inspiration. Her spunk and passion reminded me of myself at the end of high school. So dedicated, so ready to help the world. I wouldn’t say that the time plunge smoldered that passion, but it definitely made it much harder. My new focus became survival, and escape. Hoping for years to see my father come stumbling through the wilderness to rescue me and take me back to the cusp of the turn of the century into the year 2000. But in Susan I saw a more empowered version of myself, able to extend her vision and compassion outward through the opportunities she was given. I felt so lucky to have her as a daughter, and to have her support for my endeavors to help after all the times when I felt I could do nothing, or very little, unable to see beyond the time traveler’s paradox.

It was truly unbelievable, living in that time. Every day we went to the kitchens and pantries, there were a shocking number of new families and individuals in the lines. As we dipped further into the Depression, the numbers climbed, and the mouths to feed seemed inexorable. And with every day, the faces seemed to wear deeper into poverty and sadness. I watched the families bringing in their little babies wrapped in rags, the young men without places to go who had lost their jobs and been living on the streets, their faces caked in dirt and grime. The elderly, who couldn’t work, and lost everything in the collapse, stumbled in, all of their investments out the window. It was a sadness I had never known. Even during the war, it felt removed, so foreign. But this, at home, and so close to you, you couldn’t ignore it. There were people starving on your doorstep, and we had to do everything we could without falling into it ourselves. But I was lucky, the gold I had saved up saved us. I only wished that I could have warned the nation. Sent anonymous letters to the President, anything.

But I knew that such hopes were all in vain. What had happened had to happen, and to tamper with the proceeding of time was a dangerous, even deadly game. And so I sat, behind the counters of the food pantries and kitchens, serving out watered down food to those who were less fortunate, trying to focus on the good, and not get swept up in the unrelenting suffering that was so prominent across the entire nation, and so evident on our own streets.

As Chief Detective, Sam’s job was safe. This was good for us, but even with drastically cut wages, the guilt weighed on him, as he had to watch members of the force let go due to budget cuts and financial strain. Todd, luckily for Susan, was able to keep his position as well. He was a fine police officer, and his humility was recognized as an asset during the hard times. Todd and Sam began spending evenings together after work now and then, having a drink on the way home, to console their own emotional malaise brought on by the mass suffering and hardship they attended to first hand during the day.

The Met decided to keep Susan on. She had felt so incredibly lucky she almost didn’t know what to do with herself. I often reminded her that success was nothing to be ashamed of, despite the circumstances of those around her. She was doing everything she could to help, and that was recognized by all.

We were never an especially pious family, but on Sundays we all began attending mass in the big church down the block from our home. If the Sullivans were in town, they would join us. There was solace in mingling with the community. Attending brought everyone together, to alleviate the suffering and give comfort to those who had lost. For the first time in my life, I began to pray regularly. Not only praying for those in need, and for the swift recovery that I knew would be anything but, but a quiet prayer asking why I was meant to live through such tumultuous times in our country’s history, with the painful knowledge of what was to come harbored inside myself without any way to ameliorate or prevent the adversity.