Time and Again

I gave him Dr. Prime's message as he climbed the last few stairs up into the light, and he began nodding sadly. "I know. I know. Everyone's complaining. It is too warm!" He stepped up into the vestibule, sighing, and nodded toward the plaster wall beside me. "Feel!" I put my hand on the wall and nodded; it was pretty warm. "Flue goes up through there, and we're burning wood these days." He rolled his eyes up toward the squealing and sawing. "Cutting an elevator shaft through, and the owner's burning the old flooring," he said contemptuously. "Saving coal. Makes a hot fire, and a lot more work for me."

I listened, making sympathetic grimaces, then said I was looking for a tenant, Jacob Pickering. He sighed, and said, "Well, Mr. Pickering, what's your complaint? If it's too hot, I can't —»

"No, I'm not Pickering; I'm looking for him. Which is his office?"

But that was too much; he was shaking his head again, turning back toward the basement. "I don't know; how should I know? I know the old tenants; I knew every tenant when the paper was still here! Now the paper's gone, building's gone downhill. Potter Building it is now," he said contemptuously. "All the old tenants are leaving fast as their lease expires. Full of fly-by-nights now. They come and they go, some even sublet and don't tell me or Mr. Potter. I can't keep track of them; have you been upstairs?" I said no, and he shook his head at the impossibility of describing it. "Rabbit warren. Chopped up into new little offices with matchboard siding; you could spit through the walls! Even new hallways up there now, and be still more of them pretty soon, up on the top floors where the paper was. Who knows who's up there?"

I was stuck for a moment, then I thought of something. "How do they get their mail if you don't know who's where?"

He mumbled, his head ducked, starting down the stairs. "Oh, I manage; I always manage somehow."

"I'm sure you do, but how do you manage?"

I had him now; he had to stop and look back and say it. "I keep a book."

I'd guessed that. "And where's the book?"

"Downstairs," he said irritably. '"Way back somewhere; I'm not sure where I —»

I had my hand in my pocket, "Well, I realize it's a lot of trouble." I found a quarter, remembering that it was more than an hour's pay for this man, and handed it to him. "But I'd be very grateful —»

"You're a gentleman, sir; glad to oblige. Be back in a minute."

It was more than a minute, but he came back upstairs with a pocket notebook, the cardboard cover curling back, the upper corners of the pages splayed out; it had a hole punched through a corner, a piece of dirty white twine tied through it in a loop. He opened it, sca

I climbed upstairs, and on the second floor the door of the office immediately to my right beside the staircase stood open, the steady sound of the sawing and the regular shrieks of pulled nails came from the doorway, and I walked over and stood looking in. Two carpenters in white overalls knelt on the floor, their backs to me. One was sawing through the wooden floorboards between the joists, allowing the short sections of sawed-off tongue-and-groove boarding and wider subflooring to drop straight through to the basement — where the old janitor, no doubt, had to gather them up and burn them. The second carpenter was methodically prying loose the short stubs remaining nailed to the joists, using the claws of a hammer, and letting them drop through to the basement too. The two men were gradually working their way backward toward the doorway I stood in. Between them and the opposite wall the flooring was gone, the big wooden joists fully exposed. Presently they'd be cut off and burned, too, I supposed.

On the third floor, the heavy paneled-wood door of the room directly above the carpenters was fastened with a newly installed and very big padlock; painted on the door in red was DANGER! KEEP OUT! SHAFT-WAY! The door of the next office was stenciled 27, and was locked: I tried the knob cautiously, after listening at the door crack. There was no one else around. I was standing in a short corridor that branched off the main corridor at a right angle, and now I quickly dropped to one knee to look through the keyhole of Room 27. Straight ahead across the office I saw a tall dirty window, gray-white with winter daylight; directly under it stood a rolltop desk and a chair. My view to the left was blocked by something standing directly beside the door, so close it was out of focus. To the right I could see one edge of what had apparently been an open doorway co

I'd learned all I was going to learn, and probably all I needed to learn, about Jake Pickering's office. For half a minute or so I stood there in the corridor — till I heard someone's footsteps coming down the stairs. I knew why I hated to turn and walk away; now my mission was completed, and I wished it weren't.

I walked back to the main corridor, then turned away from the staircase to walk on through the width of the building, passing the doors of Andrew J. Todd, lawyer; Prof. Charles A. Seeley, chemist; The American Engine Company; J.H. Hunter, notary. Then I came to the The New-York Observer offices facing onto Park Row, and the staircase to the street. Walking downstairs I was suddenly aware of how hungry I was.

I had lunch at the Astor House, across Broadway as Carmody had said, catercorner from the post office. But I almost turned around and left when I stepped into the lobby. It was packed with men standing in groups and pairs, talking, nearly every one of them wearing his hat, and the marble floor was covered, and I mean covered, with tobacco juice, as I knew they called it. Even as I stood in the entrance looking around, four or five seconds at most, a dozen men must have turned, each with a swollen cheek, to spit more or less expertly and more or less carefully at porcelain cuspidors scattered all over the big lobby floor; some didn't even bother looking. Trying to think of something else, I walked the length of the lobby past an enormous stick-and-umbrella stand, a railway ticket office, telegraph office, newspaper and cigar stand, and into an enormous, fantastically noisy counter restaurant, with a big oak-framed sign reading NO SWEARING, PLEASE. But I had two dozen Blue Point oysters fresh that morning from New York Bay, and they were absolutely great, and I was glad I'd come.

I took the El back to Gramercy Park. I'd noticed the station just east of City Hall Park, got on there, and it curved north through Chatham Square, and turned out to be the old Third Avenue El. I was used to people now; already, in my mind, the other passengers were dressed as they ought to be. But at Chatham Square a family got on that I couldn't look away from. They must have arrived from Ellis Island within the hour, and — incredible to a man of the twentieth century — I could tell where they were from by the way they were dressed. The father, who wore a huge drooping mustache, and the ten-year-old son, both wore blue cloth caps with shiny black peaks; short, double-breasted, porcelain-buttoned blue jackets; short scarves tied at the throat; pants that flared far out from the waist and tapered to the ankles; and although the father wore boots, the boy — I was fascinated, and had to force my eyes away — actually wore wooden shoes. The mother was stout, crimson-cheeked, wore two dozen skirts, and exactly the kind of bo