A silence through several seconds, the tape hiss continuing. “One last question. Have you ever run into anyone else—”
“Twice. One yes; the other maybe.”
“And—?”
“Both heard my story. A woman, middle-aged at the time, who said yes, she’d always had the same two memories. I believed her. Another, a man of my age, said the same thing. I simply wasn’t sure about him. Maybe so.”
Ted pushed a control. “The tape ran out. There’s a little more on the other side, but you’ve heard it all actually. He does go on a bit.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a good one. It’s a good one. Do us a report, Ted, and—do we get the tape?”
“Oh, sure, that’s what it’s for.”
“Okay. Well, it’s a little late, folks. I had an interim report, but it’ll hold till next time. It’s a little more on the old book, is alclass="underline" the Turnbull biography. For those who came in late last time or fell asleep, that’s Amos Turnbull, friend of Jefferson and Franklin, member of the Continental Congress. But mentioned nowhere else, and no other copy of my book known by anyone. All my interim really says, though, is that I spent a lot of hours this summer reading Colonial newspapers on microfilm. Which will either drive you blind or crazy; it’s a photo finish. And found nothing, not a mention of Amos. Oh, Irv—you had some film?”
“Yeah, but no projector: this is thirty-five-millimeter. Thought I had a projector borrowed, but it fell through. I’ve got about a hundred feet of old black-and-white.”
“Showing?”
“A couple of blocks of a street in Paris; 1920, ’21, along in there. Very bright and sharp. Shops, people walking around, nothing much. But at the end of this particular street you should see the Eiffel Tower.”
“And it’s not there?”
“Right.”
“Okay, like to see that. Next time?”
“Count on it.”
“All right, then, it’s a wrap. See you all in a month, those I don’t see tomorrow; Audrey will send out notices. Anybody need a ride?”
No one did, and chattering—less of the meeting than of work, classes, children, clothes, recent vacations—they began gathering belongings from the tabletop, shoving back chairs. The bearded chairman stood by the door speaking good-nights as they left. When the last of them had passed through the door, the sound of footsteps in the wood-floored hallway diminishing, the nighttime silence beginning, he glanced at the campaign button in his hand, then flicked down the light switch and pulled the door closed, standing in the hall listening till he heard the lock click.
1
WE STOOD BUNCHED in with the little crowd you can see on the balcony down there at the right—see it?—just over the pillared entrance to the Everett House: Julia and I, her hands in her muff; and our four-year-old son, chin on the balcony rail. When I leaned over him to see his face in the light of the marching torches below us, his expression was fixed in wonder. I was here on assignment, but this was also a part of nineteenth-century life, a great parade, that I liked a lot. We had no movies, radio, or television, but we did have parades, and often. Now every possible inch of standing room down there in Union Square was lost under the packed-together shoulders and the tops of derbies, tall hats, fur caps, shawled hair, and bonnets. Winding around the roadway through that thick crowd, hundreds of marching men, and floats, flags, bands, horses, all fitfully visible in the bobbing firelight from rank after rank of gimballed canisters of smoky flame.
The sound was a thrilclass="underline" the splendid brass blare of marching bands and the yells of the crowd. What they yelled, I’d noticed again and again, was “Hurrah!”—actually pronounced hurrah. We stood hearing fireworks whistle up, watched them burst gorgeously against the black sky with that muffled fireworks pop. Skyrockets shot through these bursts and curved off, dying. Where did they land? And paper balloons, their swinging baskets of orange fire shining through the sides. Every now and then flame crawled up a paper panel, and the balloon would drop, blazing. Where? Were there men waiting on the dark rooftops around the square with buckets of water? Must have been, must have been.
It was glorious, all black dark and flowering color, marching leather shuffling on cobbles, drums banging, cymbals smashing. Only a political parade, the election weeks ahead, but fun. Another band moving past now, this one in tall flat-topped shakos with plumes and tiny peaks, the snares rattling, lots of powerful horn and trumpet and that bell-like thing that tops it all off. Splendid blaring sound, very close, and once again that night I felt the actual chill right up the spine, and the slightly embarrassing eye sting, of easy emotion about nothing.
Now a turnverein band in funny costumes, and we stayed for that—Willy insisted. Then we left to beat the crowd, coming down through the hotel. I liked the hotel because someone had told me that a couple of the old men sitting around the lobby were veterans of the War of 1812, but there were none there tonight. I didn’t believe it anyway. Out the side entrance of the hotel, and across the street, around the square, the curbs were solid with waiting carriages, their lamps lighted, an occasional iron horseshoe stomping the stone. Just as we approached him a horse began urinating, fascinating Willy, who wanted to stop and watch, Julia’s arm under mine tugging us past, me grinning. A few carriages further on we stopped to lift Willy to pat the soft nose of a more genteel horse, something he loved.
Then we walked home, the streets near to silent except for an occasional passerby or clip-clopping carriage. It was nice out, not too cold. There’d been a moon earlier, but I couldn’t find it now. Plenty of stars though, the sky a great enclosing blackness over this low city; millions of stars, those near the horizon spiky and glittery.
Willy was asleep, head sweetly heavy on my shoulder when we reached the little square of greenery which was Gramercy Park, turning to walk partly around it. We rented a house here, a three-story brownstone with basement and attic, across the park from Julia’s aunt. Julia liked being near her aunt, and so did I. I liked Aunt Ada, and it gave us a convenient and willing babysitter. We passed a carriage, horse tethered to the hitching post, carriage lamps shining orangely, and I wondered about it. Then, as we passed I heard a door, turned and saw light from the Bostwick entrance hall shining out on the steps, a man leaving, putting on his derby as he came down, and I saw the little satchel in his hand: a doctor. I said, “Old Mr. Bostwick must be sick,” and Julia said that in the park with Willy yesterday, she’d been told by another mother that he was. Old Mr. Bostwick interested me because I knew he’d been born in 1799, the year Washington died—were they contemporaries for a few months or weeks?
• • •
My name is Simon Morley, I’m “thirtyish,” as we say, and although I was born well into the twentieth century, I live back here in the nineteenth, married to a young woman born long before I was or even my parents. Because—according to Dr. E. E. Danziger, retired professor of physics from Harvard—time is like a river. It carries us forward through its bends, into the future . . . but the past remains in the bends behind us. If so, said Dr. D, we ought to be able to reach it. And got himself a government grant to try.
We are tied to the present, Dr. Danziger said, by countless threads—the countless things that make the present: automobiles, television, planes, the way Coca-Cola tastes. An endless list of tiny threads that tie us to now.
Well, study the past, he said, for the same kind of mundane details. Read its newspapers, magazines, and books. Dress and live in its style, think its thoughts—all the things that make it then. Now find a place that exists in both times unchanged; “Gateways,” he called them. And live in that place which also exists in the time you want to reach—dressing, eating, and thinking the way they did—and presently the ties holding you to the present will relax. Then blank out even the knowledge of these ties through self-hypnosis. And let your knowledge of the time you want to reach come flooding up in your mind. And there—in a Gateway existing in both times—you may, you just may make the transition.