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 melancholy. 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 curb, 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.
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 back 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 but 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.
A waiter in dark green trimmed with gilt braid stopped before me. “One, sir?” I said yes, and he glanced around worriedly, frowning, but it was a token gesture. “I’m afraid we have no empty tables, sir. Would you care to share one?” He turned, nodding toward a table at which a young woman sat alone. She smiled and nodded tolerantly. I said fine, and he took me there. She wore a headband with a plume of some kind, and sat fixing an earring as I arrived. “Tea for two?” said the waiter to me, and I glanced at her, saying, “You sure this is all right?” and she nodded, saying, “I’m not usually so bold, but I do dislike sitting alone at a thé dansant. Tea dance."