Time and Again

We talked a little more of what had happened to me at 19 Gramercy Park, while Rube sat comfortably back in a corner of the booth with a cigar; and I told him something of what I felt about New York then and now. And he listened and asked questions, absolutely fascinated. He said, "I can't do it, you know. I tried long before I met you, and I just can't achieve it; Lord, how I envy you." He glanced at his watch, then sat up reluctantly; he started to slide out of the booth, then suddenly reached across the table and put a hand on my forearm. "I don't really have to argue with you, Si, because you see it as well as I do: The project can't be dropped, it just can't. And since you want to stay with it, there's just no sense in not staying." I didn't nod or murmur any sort of agreement, but I didn't say no, either. Rube slid out of the booth, I stood up with him, and on the way back to the warehouse we talked football. Even now I feel ashamed; I have no excuse. I just could not give up the chance to go back, I knew it, and that's all there was to it.

When we got back Danziger had already left, for good — as I might have guessed, and probably had. But his girl gave me his address and phone number; he lived in an apartment building in the Bronx. I used her phone, and called but got no answer; he probably hadn't had time to get there yet, and might not have gone straight home. When I hung up, I stood with my hand on the phone for a moment or so longer, but didn't dial Kate; was I postponing getting in touch with her?

A little later, walking across town toward her shop, I thought about it. I'd been too busy, I started to tell myself, with hardly a moment to phone Kate. But while that was true, it wasn't the whole truth. Was the reluctance — it had been there, I had to admit it — co

Maybe it was the news I was going to have to give Kate: that Ira's father had been, simply, a crook; a swindler and grafter. But he was dead long before Kate was born, was no relation anyway, and the news couldn't hurt Ira. I didn't know what it was, and just moseyed along through the streets till I got to her shop.

Kate was there; she was just coming into the shop from the little back workroom when I opened the shop door and the bell jangled. She'd been stripping layers of old paint from a chair, wearing blue denims, an old blouse and an apron, and her hands were full of the gunk she was using. So we just leaned toward each other for a little peck of a kiss, and in the workroom I sat on a little keg she had there while she worked on the chair, telling her all about everything. And that was fun, she was so completely enthralled.

After Kate closed the shop we walked a block to the supermarket where she bought a steak and some butter; I went to the liquor store a few doors away and got a bottle of whiskey, then came back and picked up some soda. And when we were upstairs in Kate's little apartment, having our second drink, potatoes boiling in the kitchen, I couldn't understand why I'd hesitated about getting in touch with her. This was the only place I wanted to be, and the hours of being here that still lay ahead all looked very good to me.

Kate had a special interest, of course, in what I had to tell her as we had our drinks and during di

She got up from the table, went to her bedroom, and returned with her red-cardboard accordion folder, untying the red-string bow as she walked. And once again we looked at the strange little black-and-white snapshot of Andrew Carmody's gravestone. There it stood, mysteriously, among the gone-to-seed dandelions and sparse grass; a cartoonist's gravestone, the top a perfect half-circle, the sides straight, the whole stone sunk low in the ground and a little off kilter. And on the stone, sharp and clear, the strange design: no word, name or date, only the nine-pointed star inscribed in a circle, made from dozens of dots tapped into the stone; the design we'd seen, incredibly, impressed in the snow at the base of a lamp standard, on Broadway, New York, January 23, 1882.

We looked again, marveling, at the blue envelope and the black ink of its address, its ferrous content showing rusty through the black. Kate shook the note from the envelope and read aloud the top portion above the fold, in black. " 'If a discussion of Court House Carrara should prove of interest to you, please appear in City Hall Park at half past twelve on Thursday next.' " She lowered the note to look at me. "And now we know," she said, her voice awed. "We really know what happened in the park. I'm glad Ira didn't." She lifted the note again, and read the portion below the fold. " 'That the sending of this should cause the Destruction by Fire of the entire World' — oh, what's the missing word! — 'seems well-nigh incredible. Yet it is so, and the Fault and the Guilt' " — she paused to indicate the second missing word or words — " 'mine, and can never be denied or escaped. So, with this wretched souvenir of that Event before me, I now end the life which should have ended then.' " Kate slid the note back into its envelope. "Do whatever it is they're sending you back for, Si; but find out for me what that note means. That's why you're ignoring Danziger, isn't it? You've got to go back; you can't help it." And I nodded.

Esterhazy had the good grace in the morning not to have taken over Dr. Danziger's office. We met in Rube's little cubbyhole, Rube in shirt-sleeves behind his desk, tilted far back in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head, gri

I was to go back and resume, was about all they had to say. They wanted to know whatever else I could learn about Andrew Carmody and what happened between him and Jake Pickering: The historians especially wanted to know, Rube said; they already had a team of two historians with a couple of postgrad student assistants at the Library of Congress digging up whatever they could on his relationship with Cleveland, and a second similar team at the National Archives. Anything I could learn might expand or illuminate whatever they should find out. The end result of this pilot test project, it was hoped, would be a workable method for enlarging our entire knowledge of history.

On my way back to the Dakota — Rube drove me over — I told myself I was doing the right thing, the only thing; that there was no defect in the arguments I'd listened to and had made myself. But if that was true, I had to wonder, why did I feel I was doing wrong? And why, if I was so sure of what I was doing, hadn't I talked to Dr. Danziger? There'd been time to phone him; there still was. But I knew I wasn't going to.