Time and Again

No one likes anticlimax: There was a kind of i

"New York?" He moved one shoulder in a puzzled shrug. "Well, I wouldn't myself, but if you like, you may. I thought I was offering you something exceptional, but —»

I had to interrupt, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Dr. Danziger, but I don't mean the New York of 1894."

He wasn't smiling now; he stood staring intently into my eyes, wondering if he hadn't made a big mistake about me. "Oh?" he said softly. "When?"

"In January — I don't remember the date, but I'll find out — of the year 1882."

Before I'd even finished he was shaking his head no. "Why?"

I felt foolish saying it. "To… watch a man mail a letter."

"Just watch? That's all?" he said curiously, and I nodded. He turned abruptly, walked to the side of his desk, picked up the phone, dialed two digits, and stood waiting. "Fran? Check our records on the Dakota; they're on film. For parkside vacancies in January 1882."

We waited. I put in the time studying the model on the table, walking around it, stooping to squint across it. Then Danziger picked up a pen, scribbled rapidly on a scratch pad, said, "Thank you, Fran," and hung up. He ripped the sheet from the pad, turned to me, and his voice was disappointed. "I'm sorry to say there are two vacancies in January of 1882. One on the second floor, which is no good. But the other is on the seventh floor and runs for the entire month, from the first of the year on into February. Frankly, I'd hoped there would be none, and that your purpose would therefore be impossible, ending the matter. Si, there can be no private purposes in this project. This is a deadly serious venture, and that's not what it's for. So maybe you'd better tell me what you have in mind."

"I want to. But I don't want to just tell you, sir, I want to show you. In the morning. Because if you actually see what I'm talking about, I think you may agree."

"I don't think so." He was shaking his head again, but once more now his eyes were friendly. "By all means show me, though; in the morning if you like. Go on home now, Si; it's been quite a day."

5

About three months or so after I met Katherine Mancuso I brought her home one night; I don't remember now where we'd gone. We'd been out in the MG, and I bumped it up over the curb, parked it in its slot between her store and the next building, and we crawled out over the back end. Up in her apartment over the store, Kate put water on for tea. All this was about as usual, yet I think we both knew even while taking our coats off that in some mysterious way tonight — mysterious because the evening until now hadn't seemed any different from a lot of others — we'd crossed some sort of invisible line, and that our relationship was no longer tentative but was headed somewhere. Because Katie began telling me all about herself.

She carried in our tea, a full cup on its saucer in each hand — I knew she'd added sugar to mine in the kitchen — handed me mine, sat down beside me on the chesterfield, and began talking as though we'd both understood she was going to, as I guess we did. Most of what she told me that night is of no importance to this, but after a while she said, "You know I'm an orphan?"

I nodded; she'd told me that much long since. When Kate was two, her parents took a weekend trip, and as usual left her with Ira and Belle Carmody next door; this was in Westchester. They were much older than the Mancusos but good friends, childless, crazy about Kate. Her parents were killed driving home.

In the days that followed, the Carmodys kept Kate with them. And when it turned out there were no relatives to take her except a cousin of her mother's in another state who had never seen her, the Carmodys legally adopted Kate, the cousin glad to agree. They raised her, and of course to Katie they were her parents; she didn't remember her own.

I nodded; yes, I knew she was an orphan. And Kate got up, went to her bedroom, and came back with an accordion folder, the kind made out of shiny red cardboard that ties with an attached red cord. She opened it on her lap, found the right compartment, reached in, and — we're all actors by instinct, hams from birth — she didn't withdraw her hand but sat talking, letting my curiosity build. She said, "Ira's father was Andrew Carmody, a fairly well-known financier and political figure of nineteenth-century New York, though not one of the really famous ones. Later on he seemed to lose his moneymaking ability, and whatever fortune he had along with it. His chief claim to fame was that he was some sort of adviser to President Grover Cleveland during Cleveland's second term in the nineties, which is when Ira was born."

I nodded and, just for something to say, said, "What'd he advise him about?"

Kate smiled. "I don't know. Nothing much, I imagine; as an historical figure he was pretty minor. Ira used to say that in a very complete history of Cleveland's second administration his father would probably rate one small footnote. But he was important to Ira, because when Ira was small, I don't know how old, his father killed himself. And for the rest of Ira's life I don't think his father was ever very far from his mind."

Kate brought her hand out from the folder; she was holding a square little black-and-white snapshot. "Andrew Carmody was broke, the last of his money finally gone, and in 1898 he and his wife moved to Montana, a little town called Gillis. Years later in the thirties, long after Ira was grown and had left Gillis, he drove back there, halfway across the country, just to make sure he was right and that his father's grave was really the way he remembered it as a child.

"It was — exactly." Kate handed me the little photograph. "That's the picture Ira took that summer: That's his father's gravestone. I suppose it's still there; someday I'd like to go see."

I couldn't make out what I was looking at, staring at the glossy little snapshot on my palm. Then I recognized the shape: It was the kind of gravestone cartoonists draw, the old-fashioned straight-sided slab with the top rounded into a perfect half-circle. This one seemed to stand no more than a foot and a half or so above ground — it was much shorter than most — and was no longer perfectly upright, but canted to the left. It was sharp and clear; he'd taken this when the light was just right. There stood the stone at the head of a sparsely grassed grave, several gone-to-seed dandelions plainly visible. It was an old grave, the mound shallow, almost level again with the surrounding earth. Then I realized with a small sense of shock that the markings on the stone weren't letters; there was no inscription on the headstone, only a design, and I brought the little snap closer, tilting it toward the lighted lamp at the end of the chesterfield.

The design was a nine-pointed star inside a circle. It was formed of what must have been ninety or a hundred or so dots. The engraver had simply tapped it out, one dot after another, the points of the star touching the circle, the design covering almost the entire surface of the tombstone right down to the ground. The photograph was good, each dot a tiny shadow-blackened pit in the flaking stone surface, the weathered round-topped shape of the tombstone sharply outlined against the much darker background of hard-packed earth and sparse grass behind it, other neighboring headstones slightly out of focus in the near distance.

I have an idea that I sat staring at the little photograph for as much as a full minute, which is a long time. It had the fascination of absolute reality; somewhere far across the country outside a small Montana town this strange stone still stood, very likely, stained and roughened by years of heat, cold, and the alternate wetness and dryness of many seasons. I looked up at Kate finally. "This is what his wife put up at his grave?"