chapter 21

We took the first sight-seeing boat back to Manhattan, the handful of wintertime tourists who filed off it glancing curiously at Julia's clothes as we stood waiting to board. They ignored me, my overcoat and round fur hat, not much different from plenty of others. This was the one boat of the day returning to New York empty of passengers—except, this time, for us. The next boat would leave its new arrivals and take the first batch back, and so on throughout the day. I was grateful; I didn't feel like being stared at. A little belligerently, the attendant asked where we'd come from. I said we'd missed the last boat yesterday afternoon, and had spent the night on the island. It took him a second or so to decide what he thought about that, then he grinned a little lewdly and motioned us on; our clothes didn't seem to bother him a bit. The second deck was open, and we climbed the inside stairs to it as the boat nosed out into the channel. Then moved through the water toward Manhattan, Julia motionless beside me watchingtheskyscr(we) apers on the tip of Manhattan Island growing impossibly larger and larger. We had a completely unobstructed view of lower Manhattan, and of New Jersey, South Brooklyn, Staten Island, and of the harbor looking toward the Verrazano bridge, and for ten minutes Julia just stared without speaking. Then, leaning toward me but without for an instant taking her eyes from the immense buildings crowding the tip of Manhattan—beautiful now in the full morning sun—she said, "What makes them stand up?" I explained what I knew or thought I knew about steel frameworks, but stopped in mid-sentence. She wasn't listening, hadn't heard a word. She just sat staring, till suddenly she gripped my arm, her face lighting up. "The new bridge!" she said, pointing at the Brooklyn Bridge up the East River, to the right of Manhattan. A cargo ship heading for the sea was not so much approaching as simply swelling in size, and Julia sat staring at it. When finally it passed, quite close, its steel sides rising up past us forever, Julia shrank close to me, her eyes blinking apprehensively. "Will it tip?" she whispered. "Could it fall?" I told her it was impossible, but as we both stared up at the black clifflike side of the big ship sliding past us, its propellers mumbling, I knew what she felt. It seemed unlikely that anything this big and high out of the water could float, and I wondered what Julia would have said if the new Queen Elizabeth had incredibly steamed by. And then a plane passed, a four-engined propeller plane not too high, maybe ten thousand feet, drilling away up against the gray sky. I was pleased, glad to show off what is probably the symbolof this particular century. I said, "Julia, look"—she'd heard the sound but didn't know where to look till I pointed upward. "That's a plane, an airplane." I waited, a little smugly I suppose, for her to be astounded. But she stared up at it for a dozen seconds, smiling slightly, interested and pleased to see it, but not surprised. Then she nodded at me. "I've read of them, in Jules Verne. Of course you'd have them by now. I should love to ride on one. Are there many?" She'd already turned back to what really astounded her: the windowed cliffs of Manhattan. "Quite a few." I was laughing at myself; it served me right. There were no immigrants in Battery Park as we stepped off the boat. When we crossed the little park and reached the street, Julia stopped suddenly, a hand rising to her chest. At first I thought she'd been overwhelmed by the immediacy of the towering buildings and the narrow streets of cabs, private cars, and pedestrians, and by the sound, which was the normal traffic roar plus the ear-numbing chatter of jackhammers. But she wasn't looking at cars or buildings but at the people, the ordinary people walking past us. I looked at her closely, and understood that it wasn't the way they were dressed that had stopped her. I remembered the sudden awe that had come over me once at seeing the actually living, visibly breathing people of 1882, because now I felt certain I saw the same dizzying wonderment in Julia's face. On Liberty Island she'd been so conscious of her own appearance that the boat passengers getting off had scarcely seemed real. But now, as with me once, there they were passing before her, unnoticing—and they were alive, moving, talking!— the people of more than a lifetime after hers. When she turned to look at me her face was pale again, and she could only shake her head, wordless and frightened. We walked a short block up Broadway, past what's left of Bowling Green, and I said, "Do you know where you are?" The question startled her as though asked in a foreign city she'd never before seen. Trying to guess, she looked up and down the street, then turned to me, still half frightened by all she saw, but smiling, too. "No." "Lower Broadway." "No! It isn't!" Again she looked up and down the street, and now the smile was gone. "Oh, Si, there's nothing I know; nothing! I—" I said, "Hold it," took her arm, and we walked quickly uptown, two more short blocks. And then Julia slowed, a hand rising to her mouth in shock, staring ahead and across the street. We walked on fifty yards, stopped at the curb, and Julia and I stood staring across the street at tiny little Trinity Church lost at the bottom of a glass-and-stone canyon. Then her chin rose as she slowly lifted her gaze—up, up, and up at the towers that completely dwarfed the highest place on her Manhattan Island. Finally she turned to me. "I don't like it, Si. I don't like seeing Trinity like this!" Then once more she looked across the street and up to the distant sky above the great buildings. And nowwhen she turned back to me she was smiling again. "But I'd like to go up in one of those buildings." Still smiling, she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, making a mock shudder. "Broadway; at least it's noisy as ever." Again she glanced up and down the busy street. "How strange not to see a single horse." Suddenly she noticed. "Si! Everything's going one way!" We got a cab at the corner, and I explained one-way streets as we drove east toward Nassau Street. Julia was looking appreciatively around at the interior of the cab, and I lowered my voice so the driver wouldn't hear. "This is an automobile." "I know!" She lowered her voice, too. "I remembered your drawing of Madison Square; I recognized them the moment we saw them. I like auto mobiles. This is fun!" She felt the cushion appreciatively. "I wish Aunt Ada could see them. Look!" She pointed suddenly; she'd been glancing around her, and now she'd noticed a tiny red sedan behind us. "How cunning! And the driver is a woman! How I should like one, too!" The cab was slowing for the traffic light at Nassau Street; it was turning from green to red, and Julia understood it at sight. "How clever. Now, why in the world didn't we think of that? But of course they are electric-lighted, aren't they, behind the colored glass?" We got out where Nassau Street meets Park Row, the cab waiting at the curb. I pointed down Park Row toward Broadway. "That's where the Astor Hotel stood, Julia. They built a new one uptown at Forty-fourth Street, and now it's gone, too." I pointed again, at a building I don't think I'd ever seen before either. "And that's where the post office was." Each time I pointed Julia looked obediently, understanding my words and nodding; but I don't think it was really possible for her to understand that that was really where the Astor had been, and this was where the post office had stood. But then she exclaimed, a sudden little "Oh!" of surprised delight, as she suddenly noticed City Hall and the Court House, both looking exactly as we'd last seen them, and realized that the park across the street was City Hall Park. It, too, was unchanged as far as I could tell; if there were small changes, as there must have been, they weren't noticeable to either of us. Julia stood looking across the street at it, smiling genuinely but tremulously; for just a moment there was the shine of tears in her eyes, then they were gone in the pleasure of what she saw. Very quietly she said, "I'm glad, Si, so glad it hasn't been changed. How good to see it." Oriented for the first time now, Julia suddenly understood where we were, and looked quickly up at me for confirmation. I nodded, she turned, and—I gestured to the cabby, who followed us along the curb—we walked along Park Row, along the side of what had once been the Times Building, still here though greatly changed. And then we stopped at the site of the building we'd seen burn to the ground. A building as old, now, as the World Building had been then stood in its place. It was equally nondescript, and incredibly very much like it; it looked as though it had probably been built immediately after the fire. We stood looking at it blankly. In my mind I could easily see the great lashing tongues of orange flame crackling out the window tops of the old World Building; I could still smell the blacksmoke, still hear the hurricane roar of a fire that was now gone from all human memory, surely, except mine and the girl's beside me, and I wondered what Ida Small's life had been like. I walked forward and placed the flat of my hand against the building wall, and then so did Julia. For a moment we stood with our palms pressed to the actuality of the stone that stood here now, feeling it draw the warmth from our hands, and it should have been real. But Julia looked at me and shook her head, and I nodded. I said, "I know; it's not real for me, either." I put my hand back into my overcoat pocket, and Julia slid hers into her muff. She walked back to the curb, where our cab was waiting, then turned to the old building and pointed. "That must be about where the OBSERVER sign hung." She glanced at the cabby who was pretending not to listen, then stepped closer to me, lowering her voice. "Si, can you believe that we crawled along that sign only two days ago?" She pointed at the old Times Building. "And there is the very window we climbed through into Mr. J. Walter Thompson's office." I nodded, smiling at the difficulty of even imagining these things. I said, "His advertising agency still exists. I think it's the largest in the world now, or close to it." "Oh?" she said brightly, as though at good news from an old friend. "I'm pleased to hear it; he was a very nice man." We drove then, block after block, Julia'head constantly turning. It was nearly all completelystrange(on) toher,abrand-newplaceexcept(s) that she could see the big yellow street signs. And again and again I heard her murmur, "Gone ... gone ... gone ..." I don't know what the cabdriver was thinking; he was looking at us in his mirror every few seconds now. But when he caught my eye and started to speak, I gave him the hardest glare I had in stock. I don't really like New York cabdrivers. They've been overly publicized, have become arrogant, and I wasn't interested in anything cute this guy was about to say. Julia knew, too, that now he was listening to everything we said, and sometimes when we stopped for a light, people in cars and trucks beside us glanced in at our clothes, then looked at our faces. And of course it had happened even more when we'd walked or stood in the street. Actually I don't think anyone gave us much thought; they'd suppose we were on our way to a rehearsal of some kind, probably for a television commercial. But Julia was very aware of their looks, and when the cabdriver gave us still another inspection in his mirror, she leaned close to me and murmured, "Will we be at your house soon, Si?" and I nodded yes, and told the driver to speed it up. I made one detour, though. At Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street, I told the driver to head west, and when he started to remind me, wise-guy style, of my original directions, I said, "West on Twenty-third!" and he turned. We drove around Madison Square then, and heading south on Broadway, driving past the west side of the square, Julia grabbed my arm suddenly just as I'd thought she might. "Si!" she whispered. "It's gone! Really gone!""What is?" "The arm! The Statue of Liberty's arm!" The cabdriver was losing his mind with frustration. "It would be, of course," Julia murmured, "but... now I know that it really happened. And that the entire Statue is in the harbor." Her arm was under mine, and she squeezed my arm tight to her side. "It's scary," she said, and made herself smile at me. As we waited for the light at Twenty-third Street, Julia sat looking forward through the windshield, no longer caring about the cabby. "The Fifth Avenue Hotel," she said, pointing. "Gone." She looked back over her shoulder through the trees of the square. "All the hotels are gone. Delmonico's, too." At Twenty-second Street, waiting for the light, to turn east, Julia pointed again. "The Abbey Park Theater; gone. And the Ladies' Mile, Si?" I nodded. "Gone. All gone." The light changed, we turned east, and I said, "That's Lexington Avenue just ahead; we can turn south there for one block to Gramercy Park. Your house is still there. Do you want to see it?" "Oh, no!" She shook her head violently. "I couldn't stand that, Si." Julia was pleased with the elevator in my building, though not with the middle-aged woman holding a poodle under her arm who kept staring at Julia and her clothes all the way up to my floor. I kept a key wedged between the molding of the front doorframe and the wall of the building hallway, where they separated a little about a yard above the floor. With a folded slip of paper, I worked it out now, unlocked my door, and gestured Julia in. She stepped inside, I flicked the wall switch, and—it was almost as much a novelty to me now as to Julia—the living-room chandelier came on. She grinned like a kid, glancing from chandelier to wall switch and back at least three times. She looked at me questioningly then, I nodded, and—taking the toggle of the switch carefully between thumb and forefinger—she clicked it, the chandelier went off, and Julia stood staring up at it. "How wonderful," she murmured. "Such fine clear light any time you wish it. As easily as this," and she flicked the switch once more. "I prefer gaslight,'' I said, but that was so unbelievable she didn't bother answering it. Without taking her eyes from the chandelier, she moved the switch again, and the light went off. I got money from under the paper lining a dresser drawer, and when I went downstairs to pay off the cab, Julia stood, still staring at the chandelier, fascinated, delighted, clicking the light switch on and off, over and again. I helped Julia take off her coat, and hung it, with her hat and muff, in the closet, Julia's hand rising to push at her hair, and there was a moment or so of awkwardness and constraint between us. I think it was the act of removing coat and hat when she was alone with me in my apartment, something Julia would feel wasn't right, at least in any ordinary circumstance. She covered it byexamining my davenport and few sticks of furnished-apartment furniture, a real enough interest actually, since the look of them was new for her. She asked a question or two, then walked to the windows, where I joined her, and she stared down at Lexington Avenue for a few moments, marveling once again at being here. I remember most of the day in a series of pictures: Julia at the refrigerator while I hunted for things to make up a breakfast, marveling at its coldness, at its astonishing ability to actually create ice, at its freezing compartment, at the light that on when you opened the door; her astonishmentatinstantcoffee,herpleasureatitsfragrance,(came) and her wrinkled-nose disappointment at its taste; her surprise and pleasure in the frozen orange juice I magically took from the freezer compartment, stirred up in a pitcher, and poured over ice cubes. And countless other pictures: Julia back in the living room, her third glass of iced orange juice in her hand, as she stood looking at the blank face of my television while I stood with my hand on the knob warning her of what was going to happen when I turned it. She nodded quickly, excited by what I'd promised, possibly not believing me or at least not really comprehending that I could mean it literally. Because I turned the knob, and in spite of my warning she was badly frightened, crying out and stumbling as she backed away, spilling a dollop of juice on the rug, as a distorted pattern on the screen suddenly turned itself into the moving speaking face of a woman urging Julia to try a new, improved dishwashing soap. Jules Verne hadn't prepared her for this; television was completely astonishing; she could hardly believe what she was seeing even as she stared at it. Then she babbled, asking how it worked, and she listened to my answer uncomprehendingly, alternately watching my face and sneaking looks back at the screen. I told her that while what she was now watching was on tape, the machine could also show you distant events while they were happening, thinking this would astonish her even more. But she asked what I meant by tape, and when I told her there was a way of preserving pictures of people in motion together with the actual sounds of their voices, that was what astonished her. I think the television set—and what I told her—was so bewildering that for a few moments she wasn't sure she liked it. But I slid a chair up behind her, touching the backs of her knees, she sat down slowly, and the bewilderment turned to a fascination as absorbing as a child's. With absolute open-mouthed attention to every movement and sound, daytime soap opera or commercial, she sat in rigid straight-backed motionlessness, having forgotten to even sit back. And when I showed her that you could change the picture by turning a knob, she sat turning the knob around and around at ten-second intervals, from serial to panel show to old movie to Julia Child, and I actually had to tap her shoulder to make her turn and hear what I was saying. I said, "I'm going out for half an hour. Will you be okay here?" She just nodded, her head already turning back to the screen. In my bedroom I changed to wash slacks, sport shirt, sweater, moccasins, and put on a short tan car coat. She glanced up as I came back into the living room to say, "Is this how men dress now?" I said that yes, it was one of the ways, and she nodded, her head already turning back to a fascinating Allstate Insurance commercial.
I doubt if she realized how long I was gone, which was more than a half hour, closer to forty-five minutes. Because when I came in, she was sitting back in her chair but still staring at the television set: an old movie, a comedy from the forties that must have been ninety-five percent incomprehensible to her. But it moved and it talked and that was enough. Of the series of pictures which are my memories of a lot that happened that day, the next is even more memorable than Julia's hypnosis by television. I had to turn off the set to get her away from it; she said, "Oh, no, not yet!" as the picture shrank and the screen went dark. I was laughing. "Julia, there are other things to see! You can look at the television again later." She nodded, and stood—but reluctantly, looking back at the set—and said, "A theater in your home—six theaters! It's a miracle. How can you bear to do anything but watch it?" "Some people can't. But I don't think you'd be one of them. It's really no good, Julia, it's not worth watching, most of it." But of course she couldn't see that, not yet. I'd set the four or five packages I'd brought in on the davenport, and now I picked them up and began piling them into Julia's arms. "I think you'll have to put these on, Julia. You can change in my room." "What are they, Si? Clothes? Modern clothes?" "Yep." She hesitated, but I said gently, "People will stare at you otherwise, Julia," and she grimaced, and nodded. I said, "Forgive me for speaking of this, but I have to explain: I think you can keep on whatever underclothes you're wearing; though if you run into any problems, let me know." I was having trouble keeping my face straight. "There's a blouse, skirt, slip, and sweater in the packages. And shoes and stockings. Put them all on. I brought a garter belt for the stockings, which I'm sure you'll figure out. And if anything fits too badly, we'll stop at a store and replace it. Okay?" "Okay." She nodded shyly, and went into my room, and I opened the last package, a suit box, brought out the street coat I'd bought her, and laid it over the back of the davenport as a sort of final surprise for Julia. It was tan cloth, with wide lapels, a deep collar, and big mother-of-pearl buttons. All these things had been expensive but I didn't care. Julia was gone longer than I'd thought she'd be, and doors being as thin as they are today, which Julia surely didn't realize, I could hear her little exclamations of surprise and occasional puzzlement. Then I heard her say, "Oh!" in a shocked little tone, and the next picture in my assorted memories is of Julia—following a long wait after the "Oh!"—coming hesitatingly out of the bedroom and stopping just outside the door. Her voice embarrassed, she said, "Si, you made a mistake; just look at this skirt!" and I couldn't hold it in another second, and burst out laughing. The skirt I'd bought her was tan wool, and of a really conservative knee-length. And she had it on all right. But it was tight at the waist because she'd put it on over at least two of her own ankle-length white petticoats.
"Julia, I'm sorry!" I said; she was looking indignant. "But you can't wear those petticoats; wear the slip!" "Slip?" "The pink petticoat I brought you." "I am wearing it!" Her face was shiny red. "Under my petticoats, and it's much too short!" I'd bottled the laughter up, shoved it way down inside and it was off my face completely but fighting to get out. "No, Julia," I said gravely, "the slip isn't really too short. It's the same length as the skirt; a shade shorter so it won't show." I shrugged. "It's what they wear today. I didn't design them." She stood for a moment as though thinking about arguing it, while I kept my face rigid at the sight of a good fourteen inches of ruffled white petticoat hanging down below the hem of that skirt. Then she turned abruptly, and was gone for at least ten minutes. She came out of the bedroom walking like a duck, arms rigid at her side; it took me a few seconds and steps to realize that this strange walk was because her knees were pressed tight together. "Is this... how it's supposed to look?" She stood motionless for my inspection, and I stood staring because Julia looked great. The blouse looked fine at the collar, the chocolate-brown sweater was a snug but not too tight fit, and the skirt looked terrific. As I'd suspected, she had a fine figure, though I hadn't known her legs would be absolutely beautiful. High-heeled shoes, the clerk had reminded me, were out of style right now, but I'd insisted on buying high-heeled brown leather pumps, and now I saw that I was right. In sheer flesh-toned stockings, those high heels emphasizing her fine-boned ankles and full round calves, Julia was stunning. She was a spectacularly handsome girl in this outfit, and her long hair, gathered up in a bun at the back, seemed just right for it. My face, eyes, and grin showed what I thought, and it helped her; she smiled, too, in sudden pleasure and pride, and bent forward to look down at her skirt. Once more she caught sight of its hem, far far higher on those beautiful legs than she'd ever dreamed she'd wear. And her face flushed, she ran two steps to the davenport, snatched up the coat I'd left there, and as fast as she could move, she wrapped it around her waist, the bottom of the coat touching her shoes. "I can't!" she wailed. "Si, I simply cannot go out in the street like that!" I couldn't help it; I was laughing, shaking my head as I walked over to her, and I put an arm around her shoulders, and then on impulse and without thought I kissed her. It was just a quick kiss, and she looked startled. But she smiled, and I got her to put on the coat by telling her its hem would be longer than the skirt—as it was by an inch or so. And that helped. The coat on, she looked down at herself again, and while I think she felt like running to the bedroom again, she made herself stand still. Every woman she'd seen outside, I reminded her, wore a coat just as short, and she nodded grimly, accepting it.
I walked to my room to get a felt hat from my closet, and when I came back Julia stood at the mirror which hung over the little table beside the front door, and she was tying the strings of her bonnet under her chin. This time I didn't even bother trying to hold back; it would have been useless. I laughed for a dozen seconds, unable to stop or speak, and Julia stood looking at me, not angry but baffled; and each time I'd look at her standing there frowning puzzledly in those high heels and short modern coat, wearing that ancient, flat-topped flowered hat on her head, its strings tied in a bow under her chin, the laughter got a fresh start. I didn't mean to be rude or offend Julia, and was relieved that she didn't seem angry; it was just that she'd seemed so modern suddenly that I'd stupidly thought she understood how good she looked. But of course the new outfit was utterly alien to her; she had no way of judging it. To Julia her familiar bonnet looked just fine with these strange new clothes. But when I told her the bonnet didn't go with them, the woman she was understood instantly that it must be so, even though she couldn't perceive it, and she yanked loose the bow under her chin and snatched off the bonnet. Plenty of women went bareheaded in the street, I told her, especially with long hair like hers. She looked surprised and doubtful about that, and I said if it bothered her when we got out, we'd stop and buy her a new hat. Then I put my hands on her coat sleeves at the shoulder, and stood at arm's length looking her over, letting what I thought and felt show. "Julia, take my word for this; when we go out now, you'll be one of the best-looking women in all New York. And that's the truth." She saw that I meant it, and I watched the pleasure come into her eyes, and saw her chin lift. Then, wobbling a bit on heels an inch higher and much smaller than she was used to but managing it pretty well, she walked back into my room; there was a full-length mirror on the closet door, and I knew she was heading for that. And knew she could face going out now, and that it wouldn't take this girl long to be as pleased as she ought to at the way she looked, and I wished I'd kissed her again before she moved away from my hands at her shoulders. Downstairs I got Julia into a cab right away, letting her get used to being out in full sight of the world a little dose at a time. Then we drove uptown on Third Avenue so that she could see the street astoundingly without El or even streetcar tracks. At Forty-second Street we turned west to pass Grand Central Station, and Julia said, and I agreed, that it was far more impressive than the little red-brick Grand Central we'd seen here last. Up Madison Avenue, the charming quiet little street that Julia knew unrecognizable now, of course. And then to Fifty-ninth Street along the lower edge of Central Park, and once more she had the relief and pleasure of finding something familiar essentially unchanged. I hired one of the horse-drawn hacks that wait in a line beside the park on Fifty-ninth Street; I thought Julia would enjoy it. And for a while—clip-clop, clip-clop once more—we drove more or less aimlessly along the winding roadways while Julia marveled at the absence of any other horses, and at the swiftness and relative silence of the "auto mobiles." She liked the cars, thought they were far more handsome and much more interesting than carriages, and I realized she'd rather have taken a cab. Along Central Park West, and I showed her the Dakota surrounded by other buildings now; then we drove back to the hack stand. I paid off the driver, and we walked on toward the corner ofFifty-ninth and Fifth. This was the corner at which I'd had my first real look, on a cold January morning, at the world of 1882, staring in fright and fierce excitement at the horse-drawn bus approaching me, then turning to look south at a narrow, quiet residential Fifth Avenue. I'd been with Kate, but I didn't want to think about that just now. I wanted Julia to see that very same stretch of Fifth Avenue in my world. Approaching the corner, across the street from the Plaza Hotel, I said, "We're walking along beside Central Park, Julia; and that's the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth, so you know where you are." I'd timed this carefully, and now I raised my arm, saying, "So tell me—what street is that?" and I pointed down the length of what may just be the most spectacular dozen and a half blocks in the world. She gasped, turned a stunned face to me, then looked back, and the magnitude of the change in what she saw, the assault on the senses of that sudden look at today's astonishing structures, was almost too much. "Fifth Avenue?" she said weakly, and then, astounded, "That is Fifth Avenue!?" "Yes." For as long as a minute we both stood looking down its length, remembering what it had been. Then Julia glanced at me, managing a smile, and we walked down Fifth, passing the shining immensities, the breathtakingly handsome and the miserably ugly architectural confections along the mile or so that at least half the people in the world have seen in actuality or on film. Those great smooth-faced buildings and walls of glass are alien even to modern eyes, and I'm not sure Julia was able to apprehend them fully, they were so divorced from anything and everything she knew. It was so nearly impossible, I think, to take in and even try to comprehend, that when she looked across Fifty-first Street just ahead, suddenly narrowing her eyes to be sure she really saw it, she felt as I once had, but even more strongly—she burst into tears at sight of St. Patrick's Cathedral standing almost unchanged in this other world. Across the street from the cathedral at Rockefeller Center—which I don't think Julia ever even noticed—there are stone benches, and I led Julia to one. Then we sat while she stared over at St. Pat's; then she looked up Fifth Avenue, back at St. Patrick's for a reference point; then she looked down Fifth to the south; then once again her eyes swung back to the old cathedral for relief. It helped convince her that she was where she was, its familiarity a comfort and reassurance, and presently we walked on. Here and there Julia found familiar old names; women's stores she'd seen last on Broadway. And we'd stop while she stared at the glittering display windows, drinking it in, fascinated by the jewelry, the clothes, the furs, hats, and shoes. I said. "The Ladies' Mile, Julia," and she nodded. "I think I like it. I think possibly..." She hesitated, then continued, "They're very strange, but I think possibly I'd come to like these things." Once more she looked slowly up and down the length of Fifth Avenue. "Even these buildings." She shook her head. "Who could believe it? Who could ever imagine this?" At Forty-second Street we looked at the soot-marked white building of the main Public Library, and I marveled with Julia at the absence of the great slant-walled reservoir. Then—sheneeded rest from looking—I took her to a small bar I remembered on Thirty-ninth Street. At first she refused to go to "a saloon," but then she accepted the knowledge that today women did many things they once hadn't done. We had a table off in a corner away from the bar, only one other couple there, whispering in a corner. Julia had a glass of wine, I had whiskey-and-soda, and Julia relaxed. By tacit agreement we hadn't talked until now about what we'd left behind us; we'd needed relief from it, and had had it, but now again we talked of the fire ... of Jake Pickering ... of Carmody's strange behavior, and our flight from Inspector Byrnes. In this room, the sounds of today's New York a part of the very air, the names we spoke sounded odd to me, remote, even faintly comical. To have actually been frightened of walrus-mustached Inspector Byrnes who had never heard of fingerprints seemed absurd; had we really been scared or only participating in some sort of harmless make-believe? That was something of the tenor of my thoughts as we quietly talked over our drinks, and the reason I spoke with a little smile. But Julia was serious, not understanding my smile, and of course I understood that for her we were talking of a world in which Byrnes, Pickering, Carmody, and the fire in the World Building were far more real than this. We said nothing new; we were only obeying a necessity to talk things over. Julia was worried about what her aunt would be thinking now, and hanging unspoken over everything we said was the question of Julia's future. But that needed time to work out, and I said nothing about it because I had nothing to say, though I had a lot to think about. I had other things to show Julia, and after a while we left, and found a cab. It was still light, and I took Julia down to the Empire State Building, and we went up to the observation floor. In the elevator during the long long express ride past dozens of floors, Julia watched the floor-number panel, trying to believe we were really moving up this fast and this high, and her hand, holding mine, squeezed tight in the realization that we were. On the stone-railed open-air platform some ninety-odd floors above the earth, she looked out over the hazed city, making herself understand that here high over Thirty-fourth Street the distant greenery far ahead was really Central Park, and that the network of car-filled streets spread out far below us was really the city she'd known intimately but here no longer did. She looked out at the city, the park, the rivers. Then she looked around at the sky and pointed out a remarkable cloud; she'd never seen one anything like it before. I looked, and in a sense I suppose it really was a cloud—it had become one. High in the sky the air must have been windless, and a jet trail, its sharp edges gone, had puffed itself up into an absolutely straight, thin, mile-long cloud touched by the lowering sun. And then I, too, saw it not as a jet trail but as a strange elongated, ruler-straight cloud, and had one more glimpse of the different view Julia had of my world. She was interested when I told her what the cloud really was; and she enjoyed her visit up here, impressed and excited by it. But presently she turned from the railing, sighing a little, and said, "And now it's enough, Si; this is all I can stand right now. Please take me home." So instead of a restaurant for dinner—I'd meant to show off one of the nicer places—we stopped at my building's delicatessen, and I picked up some chopped steak and frozen vegetables.
The vegetables—corn and some broccoli frozen hard and sealed in transparent plastic, and which I dropped into boiling water in their sacks—fascinated Julia. As we all do, she liked the easiness of preparing them, but of course the taste or tastelessness was something else, though she was polite. We took our coffee into the living room, and, refreshed and revived, Julia said, "I've seen your world now, Si; I've had a glimpse of it, anyway. Now tell me what's been happening during all the years—it'so strange to say this—between my time and this." She snuggled back into the davenport (s) cushions, looking at me as expectantly as a child about to hear a story. I suppose I responded to her smile and expectation of pleasure, because—pausing to think, Where do you begin? How do you sum up decades?—I found myself hunting for good things to say. "Well, smallpox has been almost eliminated; you never see pock-marks now. And cholera. I don't suppose there's been even a case of it for years. Not in the United States, anyway." Julia nodded. "And polio—infantile paralysis. It's been just about eliminated, at least in all the big civilized countries." She nodded again; she seemed to have expected this. "And heart disease, too? And cancer?" "Well, no, not yet. But we're replacing hearts! Surgically removing the damaged heart and replacing it with another one from someone who just died." "That's miraculous! And they live?" "Well, not too long, usually. It doesn't really work very well. But it will." "And how long do people live? To a hundred or more, I'm sure. I read a prediction in the Atlantic Monthly—" "Actually, Julia, people don't seem to be living much longer, if at all, than in your time. Matter of fact, there are some new things that, ah—are killing us off and shortening our lives that don't exist in your time. Air pollution, for example. But we have air conditioning." "What's that?" "Machines that cool off the air in summer." "Everywhere?" "No, no; just indoors. I've got one in the bedroom—that thing in the window, if you noticed it. During a hot spell it'll cool the air to seventy degrees." "What a luxury." "Yeah, it's pretty nice. And they have them in most offices now, restaurants, movies, hotels.""What are movies? You've mentioned them before." I explained that they were like television only much larger, much clearer, and—every now and then—much better. Then I found myself talking about electric blankets, supermarkets, radar, air travel, automatic washers, dishwashers, and even, Lord forgive me, freeways. Julia finished the last of her coffee, picked up my empty cup and saucer, and took it with hers to the kitchen. She walked back into the living room saying, "But what's been happening, Si? Tell me about that." As I thought about it, in terms of actual events, she began wandering about the room, fingering the drapes, looking at the back of the television set, flicking the overhead light fixture on and off a few times. I was stuck for an answer. It reminded me of letter writing; you can fill several pages describing a weekend, but try bringing an old friend up-to-date with the events of the last five years, and it's not so easy. What had happened in more than a lifetime? "Well, there are fifty states now." "Fifty?" "Yep," I said as smugly as though I'd created them. "All the territories are states now. Also Alaska and Hawaii. And they've changed the flag; it has fifty stars now." Julia nodded, interested; she was poking through the magazine rack at the end of the davenport, and now she pulled out a newspaper. "And, let's see. Well, there was an earthquake in San Francisco in... 1906, I think. The city was pretty well destroyed, mostly by the fire afterward." "Oh, I'm so sorry; it's a lovely city, I've heard." She nodded at the newspaper in her hand. "You have a way to print photographs, I see." She put down the paper and walked to my bookshelves. "Yes, also in color. There ought to be an old Life magazine around somewhere with some color photos. And—my God, how could I forget! We're shooting rockets into space! They carry capsules with men in them. A couple of them have traveled to the moon, and landed. With men in them. And returned to earth." "Do you mean that? To the moon? With men in them?" "Yes, it's really true." Again I heard the ridiculous note in my voice sounding as though I'd had something to do with it. She looked delighted. "Have they been on the moon?" "Yep. Walked around on it.""That's fascinating!" I hesitated, then said, "Yeah. I suppose so. But not as much as I'd have thought when I was a kid reading science fiction." She looked puzzled, and I said, "It's hard to explain, Julia, but... it doesn't seem to mean anything. After the excitement of the actual trip—it was on television, if you can imagine that, Julia; we could actually see and hear the men on the moon—I almost forgot about it. Right away, too; I seldom thought about it afterward. It was unbelievably courageous of the men, and yet ... somehow the project almost seemed to lack dignity. Because it didn't have any real purpose or point." I stopped because she wasn't listening. As I'd talked, Julia had been looking over my book titles and presently she'd taken down a novel and begun leafing through it. Now, suddenly, she swung around to face me, and her face and neck were scarlet right down to the white collar of her blouse. "Si. Things like this"—she glanced at the open pages of the book in her hands, horrified—"are said in print?" She clapped the book shut as though the words could crawl off the page. "I would never have believed it!" She couldn't look at me. I had nothing to say. How explain the changes in thought over more than a lifetime? But I was smiling; the novel she'd looked at was really very mild. There were others on the shelves that might literally have made her faint. Disturbed, agitated, Julia had reached out and plucked another book from the shelves almost at random. She read the title aloud, hardly listening to herself, anxious to bury the subject of the horror she'd come onto. " 'A Pictorial History of World War Eye,' " she said. Then the meaning of the words came to her. "A war? World war? What does that mean, Si?" She started to open the book, and as her hand moved I was on my feet and walking quickly toward her. It's always astonishing to realize later how lightning-fast the mind can sometimes work, what a lengthy series of thoughts and images it can produce within a fraction of a second. It had been a long time since I'd looked through the book Julia was opening. But during two very fast steps to her side I was remembering dozens of the photographs it contained: a destroyed town, only rubble and partial walls, and in the foreground a dead horse in a ditch ... refugees on a dirt road, the frightened face of a small girl looking at the camera ... an airplane going down in flames ... a trench half filled with dead bodies in uniform, their legs wrapped in cloth puttees, the face of one of them decomposed so badly it was mostly skull, though the hair remained. And one photograph I particularly remembered in every detail: On a shelf-like projection shoved into the wall of the trench sat a bareheaded soldier, alive. His feet were ankle-deep in water at the bottom of the trench directly beside a corpse, and he was smoking a cigarette, looking out at the camera hollow-eyed, stupefied, as though he'd never smiled or ever would. These horrors, I had suddenly realized, mustn't be revealed to Julia unless she joined the world that had produced them, and—making myself smile—I took the book from her hand just before she could open its pages. "Oh, yes," I said easily, turning the book to look at the gold letters of the title on the spine, as though to confirm the title. "That happened a long time ago.""A world war?" "They called it that, Julia, because ... all the world was concerned about it. It was everyone's business, you see, and ... they soon put a stop to it. I'd almost forgotten it." How much sense that made to her, if any, I don't know. She said, "And what does 'World War Eye' mean?" "Well..." I couldn't think of anything to say but the truth. "That isn't a letter of the alphabet. It's a number, Julia, a Roman numeral." "World War ... one? There've been more?" "A second one." She was suspicious. "And—what was it like?" My mind performed its commonplace miracle again. Hardly pausing before I replied, I was able to consider the four long years of trench warfare of World War I: the battle at Verdun in which a million men had died, unrestricted submarine warfare. Then I thought of World War II and the destruction of cities by the Germans, the killing of women, old people and babies; of the fire-bombings of German cities by the Americans, creating actual hundred-mile-an-hour hurricanes of fire incinerating women, old people and babies. And of a man I have often imagined, a German designer, getting up each morning, having breakfast, going to his office, sitting at his drawing board, neatly rolling back his sleeves, and then very carefully, with detailed india-ink drawings and precise manufacturing specifications, designing false shower heads which would presently loose poison gas to kill people by the millions in what were literally factories of death. And I thought of people killed even more efficiently: instantaneous death for hundreds of thousands in the brilliant flashes of two atomic explosions over Japan. What was World War II like? Unbelievably, it was worse than World War I, and no answer or foolish lie came to mind now. She guessed. She knew that wars weren't called "world wars" for nothing. She looked at the thickness of the pictorial history I had taken from her; then she looked up at my face and said, "I don't want to hear about it." "I don't want to tell you." I put the book back in its place, and we returned to the davenport. Julia didn't sit back, though. She sat on the edge of the cushion, her hands folded—clenched together, actually—in her lap. Staring straight ahead, getting her thoughts in order, she was silent for a few moments. Then she said, "During the day I've thought about what I wanted to do. And I've thought about staying here, if it were possible to tell Aunt Ada what had happened. During part of the day, when we walked down Fifth Avenue, I thought I'd made up my mind that if we could tell Ada, I would stay." I was sitting beside Julia, and she turned to look at me, managing a little smile. "I never thought I could possibly say this to a man, but I can: Do you love me, Si?" "Yes.""And I you. Almost from the first, though I didn't know it. But Jake guessed it, didn't he? Or felt it. Now I know, too. What should I do, Si? What do you want me to do? Shall I stay here?" I thought that needed thinking about, then realized it didn't. I suppose Julia believed I was considering my answer as I sat looking at her face, but I wasn't. I was talking to her silently. I said, No, I won't let you stay here. Julia, we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it. I stopped; I wasn't going to say any of these things. The burden wasn't hers. I said, "You've been to Harlem." "Yes, of course." "Do you like it?" "Certainly. It's charming; I've always liked the country." "Have you ever walked in Central Park at night?" "Yes." "Alone?" "Yes; it's very peaceful." There were horrors in Julia's time, and I knew it. I knew that the seeds of everything I hated in my own time were already planted and sprouting in hers. But they hadn't yet flowered. In Julia's New York the streets could still fill with sleighs on a moonlit night of new snow, of strangers calling to each other, of singing and laughing. Life still had meaning and purpose in people's minds; the great emptiness hadn't begun. Now the good times to be alive seemed to be gone, Julia's probably the last of them. I said, "You have to go back," and reached over to take her hands in mine. "Just believe me, Julia. Because I love you. You can't stay here." After a few moments she nodded slowly. "And you, Si—will you come back, too?"The elation at the very thought of it showed in my face because Julia smiled. But I had to say, "I don't know. I have some duties here first." "And you don't know if you could, do you? For the rest of your life." "I'd have to be very sure." "Yes, you would. For both our sakes." For several moments we looked at each other; then Julia said, "I'm going back, now, Si, tonight. Or I'll begin pleading with you to come, too. And to spend the rest of your life in another time is something you must determine alone." I thought so, too, and I nodded. "Can you go back alone?" "I think so. I couldn't have come here into a future past all imagining; you had to bring me. But I can visualize my own time, feel it, and know it is there—far better than you the first time you tried." Something roared up in my mind that I'd almost forgotten, it seemed so remote from this room and time. "Carmody! You can't go back, Julia! Carmody will—" "No, he won't." She was shaking her head. "Do you remember what I was doing when Inspector Byrnes came for us? You were downstairs in the parlor, reading and I—" "You were upstairs." "Yes; in Jake's room, Si. I'd folded his clothes and put them into his trunk. And I was wrapping his boots when I heard you call. This afternoon for no reason I can understand, I remembered those boots. I'd just picked them up when the doorbell rang, and, Si—I saw the heels. The nails formed a pattern, and the pattern was a nine-pointed star in a circle. Jake survived the fire, not Carmody. That was Jake at Carmody's home covered with bandages. And filled with hate." I knew it was true, and I knew what had happened. "My God, Julia; he walked out of that fire, somehow. Badly burned, yet a plan already forming in his mind. He walked straight to Carmody's, I'm certain, saw Carmody's widow, and—can you conceive of this?—they made a deal! Without Carmody she could lose the fortune, so he became Carmody. When we saw her at the Charity Ball, her husband newly dead, she'd already made the arrangement. Has anyone ever wanted money and position more than those two? They really make a pair, don't they!" "What are you smiling at?" "Was I? I didn't realize. It's not easy to explain, but ... I'm smiling because Jake is such a villain! It's the first time I've ever even used the word, but it's what he is, all right. Complete. In everything he does. He's a complete man of his times, and I guess I'm also smiling because in spiteof everything I like him. Good old Jake, disguised as Carmody, down on Wall Street at last. I hope he corners the market, whatever that means." "Yes," Julia said, "he was cursed. I hope he finds happiness, though I am certain he will not." She didn't know what I'd meant, of course. To her there was no strangeness or comedy in the word villain; it's what Jake was, that's all. She said, "He can't harm me now; I know who he is, and when he understands that, I'm safe. So will you be ... if you come back." She stood abruptly, and walked quickly to the bedroom to change her clothes. I rode downtown with Julia in a cab. It was dark now; she sat back from the window, and no one but the driver saw her clothes. Half a block from our destination we got out, well away from the nearest streetlamp. I paid off the cab, then Julia and I walked quickly to the immense granite-block base of the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. In the deepest shadows I took Julia's hands in mine and stood looking at her. In her long skirt, her coat and bonnet, her muff hanging from her wrist on its loop, she looked right; she looked the way Julia ought to. I said, "I want to come back; I want to spend my life with you, but..." "I know. I know." We repeated what we'd already said, several times. I took Julia in my arms then, and held her for quite a long time. I kissed her, we looked at each other once more, then simultaneously inhaled, mouths opening to speak. We stood staring, breaths held momentarily, then smiled a little sadly; we'd said it all. Julia reached out and laid her fingers on my cheek for a moment, then shook her head quickly; she wouldn't say goodbye. She took my hand, and we walked a few paces out from the great granite wall of the bridge tower, then turned to look at it; now it was like an enormous stone curtain shutting out the world. She said, "The time I was born into and belong to are there, Si; far more real to me than the time I glimpsed today. My own world ... I can feel it very strongly, it's very real; can't you?" I nodded; I couldn't speak. Julia turned, kissed me very quickly, then let go my hand and walked swiftly forward at a long angle toward the corner of that enormous wall. She reached it, hesitated, looked back as though she were going to speak, but didn't. She took the final steps and was gone then, around the corner of the huge base of the tower, the sound of her steps rapidly receding. Silence. Then I began to walk toward the same corner. I broke into a run, fast as I could move, and was around it far quicker than Julia could have disappeared from sight. But she was gone.