That made me smile. Julia’s idea of a good song—everybody’s idea—was one her aunt had just bought, the sheet music, called “Baby’s Gone to Heaven.” All about a dead baby, and the cover—a truly bad black-and-white drawing I’d have secretly buried late at night—showed a woman, tears streaming, arms lifted toward a floating baby drifting up into a heavenly glow. Aunt Ada’s boarders and friends, and some of our friends, too, would sing that kind of song standing around the organ. Some would smile, demonstrating sophisticated amusement, but most sniffled, eyes moist. And my songs were odd?
But I was smiling at more than songs. Here in the deep of the nineteenth century, I’d become a part of it, certainly. I knew how this time lived, thought, felt, and believed, and their ways were mine now. But like a man living permanently in another country, knowing its language and customs, becoming indistinguishably a part of it, I nevertheless carried hidden things that remained forever foreign. Things like my idea of humor and of what a song should be come from earliest childhood, and can’t be changed.
“And when I hear you humming your songs,” Julia said, “I know you’re thinking of your time.” The late twentieth century scared Julia; she hated everything she knew about it. She wanted me to be happy, but happy here.
“Well, of course I think about my own time occasionally.”
“Could you go back, Si? Can you still do it?”
“Well . . . I’m not sure; it’s been five years. At the Project we learned that if you can move into another time, you can usually do it again. But I really don’t know. Don’t want to anyway.”
“Do you think others have done it?”
“Martin Lastvogel thought so; he was the teacher at the Project. He showed me an ad once, a personals ad in an 1891 New York Times. Said something like, ‘Alice, Alice, I’m here but I can’t get back! Say hello for me to the city, MOMA, the library, and Eddie and Mom. Oh, pray for me!’ And he said there’s a tombstone in Trinity Church cemetery that reads, ‘Everett Brownlee, Born 1910, Died 1895.’ Martin said people assume it was a mistake, but that people don’t make that kind of mistake on a tombstone. He thinks the dates are correct. Yeah, of course there’ve been others; always. The concept isn’t hard; Dr. D couldn’t have been the first to think of it. Not many can manage to do it though,” I added, and detected a hint of smugness in my voice.
“Do you ever want to go back? Just as . . . a kind of visit to your own time?”
“No.”
“Because of what you did.”
We’d had this conversation half a dozen times in the past five years, but I knew she needed reassurance, and nodded. “On February 6, 1882, her eighteenth birthday: I can see her standing in the theater lobby in her new green dress. Just eighteen, and about to meet the man she’d eventually marry.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Si.”
“Oh, I don’t, really. But I think about it. Me standing there, knowing what was coming, knowing what I had to do. And watching him outside walking toward the lobby doors. Young Otto Danziger, about to step into the lobby where he’d be introduced to her: he even looked like Dr. D! Then I see myself treacherously stepping out, unlighted cigar in hand, asking him for a light. Deliberately delaying him. Till I saw her leave the lobby to go inside. So they never met, it was that simple. Never met, never married, so Dr. D was never born. And without him, of course—so strange to think about it—there was never a Project.” Julia lay beside me, listening like a child to a familiar story, and I smiled and said, “But what I do like to think about is Rube Prien. And Esterhazy. Living entirely different lives now, far ahead in the future. Never knowing about a—a what?—a different sequence of time in which there had been a Project. But I liked Dr. D, Julia. And he trusted me. What I did was like murder. So I don’t want to visit my own time, because you know the first thing I’d do? I’d pick up a New York phone book and look up E. E. Danziger. Knowing it wouldn’t be there. Couldn’t be. Because I came back to the past . . . and changed the future.”
One of the pleasures of nineteenth-century life had been giving up some of the relentless self-examination of the twentieth. And now—enough! I smiled at Julia lying wide-eyed beside me, and said, “So I’m staying right here. With the girl who led the intruder from the twentieth century up the back stairs of her Aunt Ada’s boarding house. While I followed, watching her marvelous legs in those truly lovely, thick, blue-and-white-striped wool stockings.”
“You should have looked elsewhere.”
“I did. Here.”
“Now, now.”
“And here.”
“Si, we are talking seriously. And it’s very late. This is not the time for that.” But it was.
2
THE YOUNG WOMAN looked up from her computer keyboard, smiling pleasantly, and gestured the next patient into the doctor’s office. He appeared to be in his late thirties, was bald, with red-blond hair at the back and sides, and—crossing the small room purposefully, very nearly belligerently—looked to be just under average height. Heavy shoulders, though, and thick through the chest.
Waiting at his desk, the doctor said pleasantly, “Sit down, please,” nodding at a small couch that faced his desk. “Be with you in a sec. Just looking over your sheet.” The doctor looked thirty-five, wore a faded green tennis shirt, and his hair was yellow brown and thick. But not air-blown, the patient decided, approving. No goddamn alligator on the shirt either.
He sat down to wait, his back barely touching the cushion behind him, sitting almost bolt upright, not accepting the offered softness and comfort. His hands lay unmoving on his thighs, and he kept his pink-skinned face placid as he looked around. More like a living room than an office, he thought: overlapping miniature rugs; the entire wall behind the desk bookshelves; a wide window ledge at the side scattered with publications; framed photographs of sailboats; wooden shutters darkening the room, secluding it from the world. He didn’t like it. Then he made himself sit back, and forced his shoulders to release their tension. Hostility at the self-imposed necessity of being here was unproductive.
The man at the desk tilted head and paper simultaneously to read along a margin. “My secretary has noted that you prefer not to give your name.”
“Well, we’ll see. Tell me something first. Are you a regular doctor?”
“I’m not an M.D. I have a doctorate in psychology.”
“I’ve always understood that what a man tells a doctor is confidential. That apply to you?”
“Absolutely.”
He considered that, nodded thoughtfully, then unexpectedly smiled, so warmly and genuinely that the man at the desk felt an immediate response, a surge of wanting to help; but aware, too, that the patient was taking charge. “We can add my name later if need be,” the patient said. “The thing is, I’m an officer in the Army.”
“I thought so.”
“Oh?” he said in a prove-it tone.
“Well, I don’t want to come off as Sherlock Holmes, but there are no cuffs on your pants. A solid-color knit tie. White shirt. And you haven’t unbuttoned your coat. There’s a neatness about you that says Army to me. If your suit were khaki instead of blue, I’d salute.”
“Well, you’re pretty good. A brother officer claims my pajamas have epaulets. I like the Army. Only reason I’m out of uniform is the work I’m doing these days. And the only reason I’m here instead of an army shrink—sorry.”
“That’s okay. I say it too.”
“I don’t want it in my jacket, my army file, that I consulted a, uh—”
“Psychologist: I’m not a psychiatrist. And this won’t be in any record but mine. So come on now. You have to tell me, you have to make a start.”