Then, rounding a corner, I saw it ahead, rising up against a sky luminous from the not-quite-full moon. Half a block further on, I stepped from stone walk onto wooden planking—a walkway, gradually ascending. I’d thought the little wooden booth just ahead might be closed, but it was still open, possibly to be closed in a few minutes, at twelve. Inside the tall booth, as I stopped before the little grilled window, sat a mustached man wearing a derby and smoking a pipe. I slid the one-cent piece, the toll Julia had remembered, across the wooden counter, polished and hollowed from use, and he said, “Thank you, sir.” A hundred yards or so further on, still climbing, I passed over the shoreline well below me now, and walked on out onto and up the long slow glorious curve of the new East River Bridge.
Far ahead, the immense, Gothic-arched stone wall of the Brooklyn tower stood black against the lighter dark of the sky, but beside me, widening out into their lovely fanlike pattern, each of the supporting cable strands stood clear and clean, stripes of moonlight. Walking steadily along beside the railing, my steps sounding on the wooden planking, I could see the river far below, blackness sprinkled with yellowed twistings of light. I couldn’t really see the water, but in my mind I could—the East River, always the same, opaque and soiled, no color, dull and sluggish. In the distance to the south I could make out a black bulk dimly lighted: a tug or barge.
Near the center of the long, long bridge, the massive supporting cable beside me at something near its lowest point, I sat down on the end of a bench, and turned to look out through the railings at the river. In the day just past, streetcars and other horse-drawn traffic had crossed this bridge endlessly. Pedestrians had moved ceaselessly along this very walkway, each paying his one-penny toll. This is a drawing I’d made for the paper a few months earlier, and while there were fewer boats, it is very much the place I saw now. Looking out at the river, I thought about other times, on nights and evenings, when I’d been here looking at this same river, the same great bridge towers, these very same cables beside me. This place, and all I looked at of its immediate surroundings, existed here now . . . just as they existed decades ahead, a true Gateway, equally a part of both times, belonging in and existing in each. And so, here on my bench in the quiet darkness, I began to think of the time ahead, working to remember, to get the feeling and the sense of the time I wanted to move into.
This was easier than trying to visualize and feel a past I had never seen, as I’d had to do the first time I tried to reach the nineteenth century. Now I knew the future I wanted to rejoin. Had seen and been part of it, knew it was there. From the roadway beside and below my walkway, I heard the steady approaching beat of hooves, then watched a roofed delivery wagon approach, the little flames of its sidelights jiggling, watched the roof slide away under my view, heard the wagon rattle and hoofbeats diminish. Then I sat, seeing nothing really, just staring down at the boards at my feet, and allowing scenes and pictures, memories, of late-twentieth-century New York to form in my mind, regaining the feel of my own time. Not forcing, just allowing it to form. And saw myself on the run through the rain one morning from bus stop to the ad agency where I worked. Which brought my drawing board there to mind, and the familiar view down onto Fifty-fourth Street from the window beside me. Leading to more thoughts of days and people of my time. To my little apartment on Lexington Avenue; small, noisy, and not enough daylight, I remembered too well. To the little lunchroom across the street where I usually had breakfast. And the laundromat. Movies . . .
It was there, my own time, the feel of it; I hadn’t forgotten. And now I began the almost effortless technique I’d learned so well. For many people self-hypnosis is impossible, but for others it isn’t hard; it’s used effectively for a lot of purposes. And I was far more than ordinarily skilled at it. Sitting here on my bench, entirely relaxed, simply staring, wide-eyed and hardly thinking, out at the river, I used my familiar skill to make this time, my life here in the nineteenth century . . . go still. Go silent, and contract. Go all tiny, and then into motionlessness. And presently I felt the strange indescribable drift, the familiar long moment of limbo between two times.
I stood, turning to face Manhattan, eyes not quite closed but looking down at the darkness of the wooden planks. Even before lifting my eyes I could already see in my mind the great rising, impossibly shining bulk of twentieth-century New York. Then I raised my head fast, eyes blinking to clear them, and stood stupidly bewildered.
I’d failed! There out before me in the moonlight lay the low-roofed old city I’d come from tonight, black dark now except for a speckling of dim pinpricks of light from gas or kerosene lamps, the church spires sharp black against the yellowed sky. And across the low roofs, across the entire width of the island, I saw the reflection of that sky lying on the water of the Hudson. And I felt—elation! I couldn’t do it, not anymore, I’d lost the ability! And was free to walk back down into that city, to Julia, Willy, Rover, back into the place and life I loved and wanted to stay in forever.
But didn’t. Because I knew. I knew what I’d done. Knew I’d sabotaged my own attempt, thinking of the drabbest aspects of my old life, of things I didn’t like, didn’t want to return to. And then sat watching myself, watching one part of my mind with another, refusing to let that time take hold, only pretending I’d felt it. I’d willed failure because I didn’t want to go, was afraid. Of . . . I didn’t know what. Of whatever I might find in the twentieth century. At the Project.
But I couldn’t let myself sneak back home knowing what I’d done. And I walked to the bridge rail, set my forearms on it comfortably, hands folded, staring down at the black of the river. And now I began allowing memories to rise and sharpen and come to life—not of a dingy apartment or a job I hadn’t liked, and the lonely times, but the memories I had just suppressed.
They came without volition, simply appeared as though I were watching a film. I saw four of us sitting on the great wide Fifth Avenue staircase of—yes, the Metropolitan Museum. Saw the enormous blue-and-white banner hung fifty feet above us across the facade. We sat far below it, lounging back on those steps in the late morning of a summer Sunday waiting for opening time. Sat casually talking with a lot of easy joking, no hurry about anything, aware of our pleasure in the feel of the sun and of the day itself. Yes.
And—well, of course the Village. Just wandering through the fine balmy night with—Grace Wunderlich? Yes, it was—the pair of us walking aimlessly, a part of the slow crowd flowing into and out of the open-doored, open-windowed places—the bars, the art shops, the cafes—the air murmuring and alive with voices.
Then a surprise: myself moving fast along a Second Avenue sidewalk at noon, a little warm and humid, the sidewalks jammed. But me moving swiftly along that walk through the crowd like a fish darting through weeds, my shoulders swinging sideways, hips twisting, slipping between, sliding past, darting around. Why was I standing here in the dark smiling at that? Because that had been fun: I was using a skill, the special acquired skill of moving fast through a New York crowd. Crazy, but I was smiling.
Standing in a line along the sidewalk outside the 8th Street Playhouse with Lennie Hindsmith, a fellow artist. We stood hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against a raw, partly rainy, partly misty evening with twenty minutes yet to wait, complaining to each other. This was boring, not worth it, maybe we ought to leave. But staying. Waiting to see a revival of a picture I’d heard and read about all my life, filmed before I was born. And complaining, I nevertheless continued to stand, inwardly and smugly happy with the knowledge that there was no other place in the world where I could be doing just this.