I couldn’t get enough of the realness of what I stood staring at. There in case after case hung their very clothes, touchable except for the glass. There hung the blue serge of a skirt once actually worn by a living girl, as they were then, the hem narrowing in just above the ankles. Beside it—surely this had really moved through the lobby of a New York theater at some forgotten play—an evening wraparound cloak of peach-colored satin trimmed with white fur, and it wasn’t hard to catch glimpses of it in my mind, moving through a crowded, buzzing lobby. The high-heeled white shoes just below the furred hem of that cloak were like today’s except not quite; I think it was something about the heels: they looked—well, funny. And the men’s suits—the left shoulder of one almost touched the glass, and I could see the faint fuzz of the tweed—were like today’s except that, no, they weren’t, everything a little different, the pants cuffs narrower, the lapels . . . different; smaller, I think. And the cloth seemed heavier, and there were more browns than I’d have expected. And the men’s hats: the brims of the felt hats were wider but that wasn’t all. I didn’t know what the other differences were, though I could see them. I wore a derby once in a while, going out with Julia, but these derbies behind the glass here weren’t the same. And there were a lot of caps.
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 schooclass="underline" 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.
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 feeclass="underline" 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 up by 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 self-hypnosis, 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.