Time Travelers Never Die (48 page)

 

They’d left the
Hermes
. They had positioned it carefully under the light, to achieve maximum effect. It looked good.

He stood a long time admiring the piece. But it wasn’t Helen. The house filled with echoes and the sound of the wind. He hadn’t realized how much he’d miss her.

 

 

DAVE
suspected that his friendship with Shel largely grew out of the fact they’d been opposites in so many ways. Where Shel was cautious, Dave could be reckless. Dave was not the guy, he’d once said, who would keep his mouth shut while Hitler was speaking. The difference in their sizes was striking. When they traveled together, Helen had once commented, they looked like a comedy team. While Dave got emotionally connected with every woman in his life, Shel was an all-or-nothing guy. The woman on his arm was either simply someone to keep him company or the love of his life.

Dave fell in love with everybody.

Another area in which they differed: Shel was perfectly content using the converter and traveling alone across the centuries. Dave had been along because of his language skills, and because a second person served as a safety factor. Shel had never said that, of course, but there was certainly some truth to it. Dave, on the other hand, could have been talking with Marcus Aurelius, but he wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much had Shel, or
someone
, not been there to share the experience. Consequently, with Shel and Helen both gone, he decided his time-traveling days were over.

He hadn’t been satisfied simply carrying a conversation with Hem ingway. He’d wanted to ride in the ambulance with him, to go chasing German submarines with him at the outbreak of World War II. But he didn’t want it badly enough to actually
do
it. At heart, Dave was shy. He would never have gone to say hello to Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and Molly Pitcher and the rest of those people.

He got bored with his career as an art dealer and started looking for a new line of work. The State Department was interested in employing him as a translator, and the CIA contacted him about coming on board. They wouldn’t tell him what they wanted him to do, other than that they would put his language skills to good use. He never found out how they knew he was available.

He discovered he couldn’t just sit on the front porch. But none of the jobs appealed to him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life parked in an office. It was hardly an appropriate career for a man who had talked with Voltaire and challenged Cesare Borgia.

In the end, he told Katie. Told her everything. And he needed to take her somewhere to provide proof.

So Katie showed up, and he took her to Ambrose, Ohio, as he had Helen. At eleven o’clock on a beautiful September morning in 1906. She loved the place. They hung out there much of the day, watching the trains roll through, drinking coffee at Sadie’s café, and sitting in the town square.

“Where would you like to go next?” he asked. “What would you like to see?”

At first, she was reluctant to move out of the twentieth century. They watched Abbott and Costello perform in a vaudeville show, took in a Fred MacMurray comedy during World War II in downtown Philadelphia, and hit some of the pubs during the Jazz Age. Katie came immediately to love the experience. “Oh, Dave, look at the trolley car.” “Dave, if we’re going to come here, I’m going to have to expand my wardrobe.” “Dave, I
love
Benny Goodman.”

Their first trip outside the safety zone was to Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, where Dave got lucky and ran into Calamity Jane again. Katie lit up Wyatt Earp’s life for a few days. They met Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday, and rode a stage coach from Fayetteville to Fort Smith. After that, there was no holding Katie down.

 

 

BUT,
for Dave, there was still something missing. And eventually he figured out what it was.

At the end of a long night in Tiberius’s Rome, they’d decided to try a Roman bath. It became a fairly risqué experience for two people from Philadelphia. The bath grounds were home to a statue of a female warrior, which they’d paused to admire on the way out. She was complete with helmet and sword. It was well past midnight when they stood before it beneath a full moon. “It’s magnificent,” said Katie.

“It’s Minerva.”

“I’ll bet,” she said.

When they reappeared at Dave’s place, Katie commented that Americans had lost the ability to enjoy themselves.

“We watch television,” Dave said.

Her eyes were shining. “So what’s for tomorrow night?”

“You make the call, Katie.”

“Me? I don’t know what’s out there. If you want, I’d be content to go back to the bath.”

“What would your mother say, love?”

“I think she’d want you to produce another one of those Q-pods.” She squinted at him. “You okay, Dave? That wasn’t too much for you, was it?”

“No. I’m good.”

“So why—?”

“Why what?”

“You don’t seem very turned on by the evening.”

“Yeah.” He sat down, and she dropped onto the sofa beside him.

“What’s the problem?”

Dave still wanted to tell the world. Conversations with Caesar. An evening with Attila. (Well, no, that had never really happened.) Lunch with Abner Doubleday.

“Lunch with
who
?”

“Never mind. Look, Katie, it kills me to have done all this stuff and not be able to do anything with it.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to advise.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“The only thing I can think of is to use the material. But put it in novel form. Tell the story. The
whole
story. As if it were fiction.”

“That’s not a bad idea, Dave. Can you
write
a novel?”

“With what I’ve seen? Are you kidding?”

“Then do it,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll never have any peace. Do you have a title?”

“I thought maybe
Time Travelers Never Wait in Line
.”

“That’s cute.”

“It’s true.”

“I suppose it is.”

“But you don’t like it?”

She shrugged. “It’s
cute
. I don’t especially like
cute
.”

“You have a better one?”

“Ummm. If I were doing it—”

“Yes?”

“I’d call it
Minerva by Moonlight
.” She sat for a minute, waiting for a reaction. But none came. “Is there something else?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I have a promise to keep.”

The end crowns all,
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER
1, 1950, was a pleasant, sun-filled day. A crowd had overflowed Ebbets Field in Brooklyn for the season-ending showdown between the charging Dodgers and the Phillies, whose seven-and-a-half-game lead, during the previous two weeks, had shrunk to a single game.

The score was tied 1-1 in the bottom of the ninth, and the Dodgers had runners at first and second with nobody out when Duke Snider rifled a line drive single to center.

Down front in a box seat, Michael Shelborne stood up with the crowd.
They
thought the winning run was coming home as Cal Abrams rounded third. But Michael knew better.

Richie Ashburn threw a strike, and catcher Stan Lopata blocked the plate and made the tag. The crowd roared its disapproval, and somebody behind him said, “Hey, we’ve still got two on.”

Michael leaned over, smiled at his son, and spoke under his breath: “It won’t matter, kid.”

IN
1934, Helen sat on the enclosed deck of their recently purchased Cape Cod villa, looking out at the ocean, which was bright and sun-swept and looked as if it went on forever. Like time. This was a Helen that Dave would have been slow to recognize. She was thirty years older, and if she had aged well, she was nevertheless no longer the loose-limbed beauty he had known.

There was movement behind her, and she turned to see Shel and his father materializing within a pair of auras. Shel had long since shed the beard.

“Hello, Dad,” she said. “How’d the game go?”

Michael laughed, gave her a hug. “As if you didn’t know.”

Shel handed her a box of popcorn. “For you, love,” he said.

She kissed him. “Dinner in about forty minutes.”

Michael looked out at the Atlantic. “What have you been doing all day, Helen?”

“Watching the kids.” A sailboat was tacking with the wind. It was carrying two boys. Teenagers.

“The Kennedys?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Michael studied them for a moment. Joe and Jack. “It’s good to see them enjoying themselves,” he said.

ASPASIA
showed up for the Riverside Theater’s opening-night performance of
Achilles
. She was accompanied by Rod Connelly, who was an instructor at the Starlight Dance Studio, and by Harvey Barnard and his wife, Amanda.

Riverside had a full house. It was not necessarily an auspicious start because Riverside
always
had a full house, and it was a small theater. Rod, of course, knew the claims that had been made for the source material, and, as one would expect, he didn’t believe a word of it. Furthermore, he had made no secret of the fact that he’d come principally to please Aspasia. “I’ve seen a couple of Greek plays,” he said, with evident distaste. “They took my high-school class to see one, I forget what it was, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

The other one had been staged at the University of Pennsylvania years before. And, though Rod didn’t directly say so, it was clear that his presence once again had been to please a young woman. Or maybe to impress her. In this latter instance, at least, he remembered the title, if not the dramatist. It had been
The Acharnians
. By, of course, Aristophanes.

Rod was adamant about people who’d send somebody an armload of Greek literature. “They won’t tell you who they are. That means they’re con artists. Trying to get away with something. If I were you, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with these things.”

Harvey’s attitude wasn’t much more positive. “It’s just too good to be true,” he said. Amanda cautioned him with stern looks to be careful. Don’t hurt Aspasia’s feelings.

Aspasia didn’t really believe it either. Still, she
wanted
to believe. And it was an exhilarating experience to settle into her seat, open the program, and see the title,
Achilles
, and, where the byline would normally be found:
Thought to be by Sophocles
.

And there was the cast, Trainor, Polyxena, Paris, and Apollo, and, of course, Achilles, actually about to come alive.

Riverside was a theater-i n-the-r ound. They had good seats, up close. The stage was decked with plants and dominated by a doorway. The program identified it as the exterior of Apollo’s chapel outside Troy.

 

 

THE
lights came on, and the chorus began a dolorous chant. Achilles made his entrance.

As the show proceeded, Aspasia tried to be skeptical. Achilles was perhaps too trusting of his longtime enemies, Polyxena too ready to give in to her lover’s determination to risk everything in a meeting with Paris. Trainor, the priest, might not have been sufficiently respectful of the greatest of the Greek warriors. But she could find no fault with Paris. He was utterly torn between what he perceived as his obligation to the slain Troilus, and to Troy itself, and his repugnance at betraying his sister and ambushing a victim who trusted him.

During the climax, he enters, with a longbow over one shoulder, and tries to opt out. “What if the bolt does not take him down?” he asks the audience, while presenting an arrow for their inspection.

He is on the verge of abandoning the effort when Apollo steps out of the shadows. “I am with you,” the god says. “Have no fear.”

And, as Achilles enters the chapel, the audience sits riveted.