Time and Again

6

I shaved for the last time on Sunday. On Monday morning, ten dummies covered by sheets stood in a row across the front of the classroom Danziger had told me to report to. I walked along the row looking them over, wanting to lift one of the sheets and peek. But before I could work up the nerve, a ski

My God, he's homely, I thought. He didn't have quite enough chin to balance his nose, which was big, sharp and too long; his hair was also too long by about three weeks and hadn't been combed for four. But when he glanced up and smiled, his eyes were friendly, eager with intelligence, and I found out later that he had a marvelous-looking wife who thought he was a wonder, and that Martin was forty-one years old.

"Okay," he said; he'd found what he was looking for, a packet of file-card notes which he riffled affectionately with a thumb, then set neatly on a corner of the desk top. "I'm not really a teacher, so just speak up whenever I'm not clear or make no sense. I'm a researcher, one of the lucky people who can earn a living doing what they like to do, in my case historical research. Ask me how streets were lighted, if at all, in fourteenth-century Paris, or what an eighteenth-century peruke was made of, or how they wrapped lard in a New England butchershop in 1926. And I'll poke around in the debris of the past, and try to find out for you. Over the weekend I've been digging into the eighties, and I'll be doing a great deal more. It's a terribly neglected period, though I don't know why because a great deal of interest seems to have been going on then.

"But I'm not here just to stuff you with facts about the period. You get along in the twentieth century without knowing everything about it." Martin walked out from behind the desk to stand beside the nearest figure; he took hold of the sheet. "And I don't think you have to know all about the eighties either. But you do have to feel them." He pulled the sheet from the figure.

There hung an old dress. It was a drab drooping tube of some heavy dark material, and I got to my feet and walked up to take a look. It hung motionless on the dummy, its hem touching the floor, the long full sleeves limp and straight at the sides. The neck was high, and an intricate pattern of tiny dull black beads lay across the chest and encircled the cuffs. Martin said, "We borrowed this from the Smithsonian. For your benefit. Flew it up here. It was made and worn in the early eighties. People walk through the Smithsonian, look at things like this, and think this is how women dressed." He began shaking his head. "But it's not. Get it through your head that it's not. Look at the color! If you can still call it a color. The old dyes don't hold up, Si!" he said as though I'd been arguing that they did. "For decades that thing has been fading, altering; into no color at all, finally. And look at the cloth. Shriveled. Shrunken in places. While in other places it sags; I think all the life has gone out of the threads. Even the bead trim has turned black!" Martin reached out and tapped my shoulder. "This is what you've got to understand, and more than that you've got to feel it: The women of the eighties weren't ghosts. They were living women, and they would never have worn that rag!" He jerked a thumb at the ancient dress. "The woman who once owned that — what did she really wear when she first put it on? Here's what she wore! To a party!"

Martin snapped the covering from the next figure, and there stood — I won't call it a dress but a gown of bright wine-red velvet, the nap fresh and unworn, the material magnificently draped in thick multiple folds, front and back. The bead trim caught the light, glittering a clear deep red, shimmering as though the garment were moving. It was spectacular; under the overhead lights the gown glowed like a jewel. "We chose this original" — Martin touched the sad, drab dress from the museum — "because they have a diary at the Smithsonian, donated with the dress, that records when and how it was made, including the dressmaker's pattern and an unfaded swatch of the material. We've had a replica made" — he reached out, his fingers unable to resist the rich new red velvet — "that is far more the dress a living woman once wore than what's left of the actual original." He stood peering at me anxiously, then gestured to the brand-new gown. "Can you see an actual breathing woman, Si, a girl, wearing this and looking absolutely great?"

And I said, "Hell, yes: I can see her dancing!"

In the next couple of hours we looked at a brown-at-the-edges cloth wreck that, unimaginably, had once actually been a child's party dress. Then we studied a duplicate in some kind of fresh flouncy pink cloth, that looked the way it did the day the girl first put it on. And I saw — as they had survived and as they had been when new — a boy's suit with brass buttons and knee pants; a postman's uniform; and a man's suit including a cutaway coat with silk-faced lapels, raveling and dusty in the original, fresh and shiny in the replica.

During that week — I couldn't keep my hands off my begi

During several days Martin and I sat leafing through books whose pages had gone brown and whose covers were sometimes speckled with mildew. As you turned the pages, corners flaked off; only a ghost could ever have read these. Then, from a box, Martin brought out the same books, identical except that now their covers were bright new reds, blues, and greens, their titles fresh-stamped in shining gold leaf, their pages pure white, the fresh black print still smelling of ink. Obviously these had never been read — not yet. And in my mind the eighties had begun to stir a little with life.

Rube was in the cafeteria lineup one noon, and he joined Martin and me for lunch. Then, during the rest of that afternoon, he took me into every office, into the carpentry and metal work shop, a small library, the conference room, the tailor's and shoemaker's shop, the control room for the Big Floor, a tiny projection room, and into every other place in the building where people were working; and he introduced me to them all.