“Of course I was fascinated by the idea of August Kemp’s resort when I heard of it. The idea seemed so compelling and at the same time so implausible. I still don’t understand how it works. Leaves of the past pressed together like the pages of a book. Absurd. But true.”
Jesse nodded. The nation’s newspapers had reacted to the advent of the City with the same incredulity. The claims made on the City’s behalf could not possibly be genuine, but reporters sent to debunk the fraud had come back converted, bearing photographs of the flying machine in which they had been permitted to ride.
“I tried to put it out of my mind. The cost of a week at Kemp’s resort wasn’t trivial, even for us. Almost like flying into orbit for a vacation. Which was what my husband said when I raised the question. It would be a titanic waste of money. I was disappointed, but I could hardly contradict him. So we flew to Switzerland that winter. An awkward trip. There were arguments. Skiing bores me. The time passed slowly, as it does in marriages that have decayed into friendships. I think Terrence sensed that.”
“Terrence is your husband?” Is or was or will be, Jesse thought: time travel caused those ordinary words to tangle up like shoestrings.
“Yes. And he genuinely wanted to make me happy, and he knew he wasn’t succeeding at it. So for my thirty-sixth birthday he conceded the point and booked us the full tour. It was a wonderful surprise … though I knew, even then, that I wanted to leave him. And not just him but the world we lived in. I knew I’d take the chance if the opportunity presented itself. I knew it without ever really admitting it to myself, if that makes any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“We signed on to the ‘Springtime in New York’ package. Very exciting, going through the Mirror, and especially when we left Futurity Station on the special train, watching the old America slide by the window, all those sleepy depots and smoky little towns, cities without skyscrapers. New York, of course. They took us to see Adelina Patti at the Academy of Music. Dinner at Delmonico’s. That was the night I made my run. Delmonico’s invented Lobster Newburg, did you know that? But as it happens, I hate lobster. So I excused myself and found my way out of the building. It was the Delmonico’s on Broad Street, a fine June evening, and there I stood on the street corner, all by myself, dressed in my period clothes, the kind they give us so we don’t shock the locals, Velcro instead of buttons and stays—do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And money in my purse, because I had made preparations. And a whole world in front of me. It felt … wonderful. For a short time. I learned better very quickly. An unchaperoned woman in New York is liable to be mistaken for a prostitute. Renting a room, buying a train ticket, even shopping for clothes, all much more difficult than I had anticipated. I learned to pass myself off as a widow. Because, God knows, the Civil War left no shortage of widows. But it’s a difficult lie to maintain. So I refined the story. I told people I had been engaged when my betrothed was killed at Waynesboro. Or I said I’d been traveling with my brother when he was taken ill. I told all sorts of lies, a lie for every occasion. Eventually I arrived here. I had convinced myself that this town would be different. I chose it because I have relatives—I suppose you could say ancestors—here. Not that I would dare introduce myself to them. I planned to make my own home here, on my own merits. I would join the church, I would be absorbed into the community. I had no better plan that that. It seemed sufficient.” She gave Jesse another smile with no discernible trace of happiness in it. “Do you know the story of the painted bird?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I read about it in a book. A man catches a bird and paints it different colors and releases it. The painted bird tries to go back to its flock, but the flock doesn’t recognize it anymore—the other birds turn on it, kill it. Well, I haven’t been killed. But otherwise, Mr. Cullum, I am that bird. I dress incorrectly, no matter how hard I try. I’ve been told I have a peculiar accent, that I talk like a sodbuster or a Negro. I don’t defer to men exactly as I should. I stare when I ought to cast my eyes down. I say the wrong words at the wrong time. In a thousand subtle ways, I am that painted bird. Which is why I live alone in a rented room. Which is why I’ve nearly run out of money and can’t find decent work. Which is why I have no friends to speak of.”
Jesse waited for her to go on. Three women strolled past the house, twirling sun umbrellas. Their conversation was a tangle of tenor voices fading in the warm spring air.
“One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. A fever could kill me. I’ve had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find—it exists, it really does, but consider what it’s buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese—not that many of them are seen in these parts. Europe is as far away as the moon, Asia might as well be Mars. And—did I mention the lightning-rod salesman?”
“Just briefly.”
“Late last summer I was standing at my window when a lightning-rod salesman came down the road. A lightning-rod salesman! You won’t understand this, but it was exciting to me—it was like something out of those old stories I loved so much. He was pulling a cart with his name painted on the side in bright red circus writing: PROFESSOR ELECTRO. A crowd of children following after him. A perfect day for it, too, sullen and hot, storm clouds swelling on the horizon. So I ran down to see him—I couldn’t help myself. But you know what Professor Electro was? Professor Electro was an old Jew with yellow eyes and a smelly blue Union jacket, hardly more than a beggar—so drunk or demented he could barely mumble his pitch, and the children were mocking him obscenely, and he looked as if he had endured so much serial humiliation that he would have been grateful if a bolt of lightning had struck him dead on the spot.”
“Disappointing,” Jesse said, though he couldn’t imagine what else she had expected from an itinerant peddler.
Mrs. Standridge turned in her chair and looked at Jesse as if he were the one who had disappointed her. “The point is, I accept your offer. Yes, you can escort me back to the City. The sooner the better.”
* * *
Jesse had been hunting runners for the first few months of 1877.
His bosses at the City had given him the assignment, ostensibly as a reward for his work with Elizabeth, also as a way to make profitable use of his skills and to get him away from Tower Two, where he was still viewed with suspicion. As it turned out, he liked the work. In those few months he had seen more of the country than he had ever expected to, and the constant travel was usefully distracting. It tired him out and helped him sleep.
“Runners” were people from the future who booked passage on one of the City’s excursions and jumped ship, generally with the aim of staying permanently in this century. Such people couldn’t be compelled to return—the City had no such legal authority in the America of 1877—but they could be offered a last chance at a ticket home without sanction, if they could be found. Most runners were like Mrs. Standridge, imaginative individuals acting out of romantic illusions; most, like Mrs. Standridge, were happy to accept a reprieve from the reality they had been forced to confront. That was true even of the less idealistic runners, the ones who planned to make a fortune by “inventing” some device they had read about in a history book or investing in a commercial stock they knew would improve. As a rule, the practical aspects of the question confounded them. Or they came to understand that the money they had hoped to earn wouldn’t buy them, in this century, anything they really wanted.