Most people failed, at the Project where we were trained. They’d try and—just couldn’t. But I could, one of the very few. Made it back into the nineteenth century, returned to make my report, then went back to stay—to marry Julia, and live out my life in the nineteenth century.
• • •
Now at our house, in familiar routine, Julia stepped on ahead up the stairs to unlock and open the front door for me; and in the hall she turned up the light. Then I passed Willy over to her because our dog—a fairly big woolly black dog with dabs of white here and there—was doing his little dance around my feet, trying to trip me for laughs. I let him out, and sat waiting on the front stoop while he wandered around, sniffing, checking to see that nothing had been changed out here. He’s a fine fellow, called Rover, a fairly common name that hadn’t yet become funny. Big black dogs, I’m afraid, are often Nig.
Rover came back to sit down beside me, and I gave him his ear rub, which he accepted graciously, tongue lolling to show appreciation. I had various little routines with Rover, adding to and improving them from time to time, but it was best, I’d learned, to keep them out here. Julia is bright, quick-minded, and as subtle and perceptive as anyone. Yet one evening when old Rove came wandering in to join us in the sitting room, with a long thread of drool hanging from his black lips, I suggested to Julia that he might be an enchanted prince and that she ought to give him a big wet kiss to release him from his spell. But all I got for that was trouble, because her sense of humor, naturally, is pure nineteenth-century. One evening fairly early in our marriage we sat reading in bed, and she laughed aloud and pointed to what she’d just read in her newspaper. I leaned over and read it; it was a joke, a filler at the bottom of a column. The little omnibuses on Broadway and on Fifth Avenue are called stages by some, others call them buses, and the joke was: “ ‘Don’t you think I have a good face for the stage?’ asked a lady with histrionic aspirations. ‘I don’t know about the stage,’ replied her gallant companion, ‘but you have a lovely face for a buss.’ ” I imitated a chuckle, nodding my head very rapidly to suggest appreciation. As I once did at a Harrigan and Hart performance which was truly terrible, dreadful “faith and begorra” Irishman jokes. But Julia actually cried from laughter, along with everyone else but me. I faked it.
“I understand you’re Man’s Best Friend,” I said to Rover now, there on the front stoop, and he agreed. (“Man’s Best Friend” was serious business here, a subject for sentimental newspaper poetry, which Julia no longer read aloud to me.) “But it seems to me,” I told Rover, who sat listening politely as though he’d never heard this before, “that it’s kind of a one-sided friendship. We do all the work. We get your dinners”—his ears lifted at the magic word—“get your water, provide beds, fireplaces, baths”—the ears flattened—“all the necessities, nay, luxuries of the carefree dog’s life.” I began leaning close to him. “But what do you do in return, Best Friend?” I leaned still closer. “Where are my slippers?” He didn’t know, but now he could, and did, as I’d expected, give me a wet tongue up the side of my face. “That’s the deal?” I said. “Dog spit all over the face? Listen”—I grabbed him around the shoulders, hugging him close while he tried to pull his head loose, but I had him. “Where did you guys ever get this idea that a face lacquered with dog spit is some kind of favor? Thousands of years, but you never learn.” I let him go, and he sat paying attention to whatever I might want to say. Dogs try to understand, they want to; cats never do. I gave Rove a friendly tail yank; then he followed me in, and out to his back-porch bed.
Up in our big bedroom Julia and I moved around, getting ready for bed, not saying much, still under the spell of a good evening. I liked this room, liked them all, but this especially: carpeted; gaslit; furnished with what I was aware were almost ridiculously massive, overornamented tables, chiffoniers, two big wardrobes, a leather chair, our big bed. But a place I loved: peaceful, a refuge.
Above my right shoulder—we were in bed now, sitting up to talk for a few moments the way we usually did—an open-flame light burned steady behind an etched and frosted shade. On the small marble-topped table beside me lay a copy of the new January 11, 1887, issue of Leslie’s Weekly. I had two drawings in it this week, and I liked looking at them; so did Julia, who saved them all. My watch and chain, the watch tick-ticking pleasantly—I had just wound it—lay on the Leslie’s. From below, outside at street level and approaching our slightly opened window, footsteps—made not by shoes but by boots, striking not concrete but cut stone, to make a sound not twentieth-century but nineteenth—footsteps approached, then moved on by, the sound distancing. As so often, I felt the thrill and mystery of simply being here, hearing those unseen late-at-night footsteps deep in the nineteenth century. Whose? Going where? For what never-to-be-known purpose? And to continue how far on into the future?
We sat against the dark carved wood of the great bedstead, snug under a thick quilt, in our nightgowns; I’d long since and absolutely refused to wear a nightcap, cold as it could get when the coals in the fireplace across the room burned out. Once in a while you’re momentarily conscious of being happy. But I’m superstitious, and I picture Fate—best be respectful, and use a capital F—as a misty presence somewhere up in the sky but not too far away. Always listening, alert and ready to punish forbidden optimism. But I couldn’t help it, feeling as purely content as it is possible to be, I would think, and in that moment as sometimes happens, Julia said, “Are you happy, Si?”
“Not at all. Why should I be?”
“Because of me maybe?”
“Well, okay. Right now . . . here in this house . . . Willy safely asleep across the hall, Rover snug in his bed, two drawings in the paper this week, and here in this cozy bed with you—”
“Stop that. It’s much too late.”
“I’m about as happy”—I glanced at the ceiling to say, “Only fooling!”—“as any human being could be without throwing up. That suit you?”
“Just barely better than nothing at all.”
“Best I can do. Why’d you ask—something bothering you?”
“Oh, no. It’s just that you’ve been singing again.”
“What?”
“Those strange songs.”
“Oh Lord, I didn’t realize.”
“Yes. After you gave Willy his bath on Sunday, I was getting him into bed, and he was trying to sing something about ‘Raindrop fa’ my head.’ ”
“Damn it, I’ve got to cut that out! I don’t want to burden that boy with any twentieth-century knowledge, not a scrap! Not for a long time anyway. If ever. This is his time, the one hell grow up and live in. And I want it to be for him just like any other—”
“Yes, yes, don’t worry, he’s forgotten, it won’t hurt him. It’s you I worry about”—she put a hand on my forearm—“when I hear you singing those songs. You don’t even know you’re doing it. Sometimes you just hum, but I know it’s from your own time because the tune is so odd.”