Time and Again

Past the great walls, presently, of the reservoir at Fifth and Forty-second where someday I knew, but the others did not, that the main Public Library would stand; down Fifth, past Madison Square and — I wished there had been light enough for Felix to photograph it — the right arm of the Statue of Liberty, the knuckles of the hand and the tip of the flame mounded with new snow. Then we swung east on Twenty-third Street toward Gramercy Park, and I said, "Mr. Pickering, thank you; it's been one of the finest evenings I ever spent."

He nodded; he was smoking a cigar now, and whenever he puffed, the smoke flowed in a long thi

Yes, I know, I thought; celebrating your chance to get rich through blackmail. Politely, I said, "No, I didn't."

He nodded again, and leaned forward to get a good look at me across Julia's lap, and I saw something smug and self-satisfied in his eyes. "Yes," he said slowly. He'd postponed this deliberately for most of the evening, I realized later, prolonging the anticipation; now he was tasting the pleasure of saying it. "We looked for you at Gabe's; I wanted you to join us in a toast." The cigar in one corner of his mouth, he gri

"Mr. Pickering and I have become engaged to be married."

After a moment I said the right things, forming the proper facial expressions. Smiling, I reached across Julia to shake Jake's hand, congratulating him. Still smiling, I agreed with Aunt Ada and Maud that it was wonderful news. Then I gri

Instead, during the few minutes before we pulled up at the curb before 19 Gramercy Park, I thought about several things. I thought about the tattooed letters still healing on his chest that marked Jake for life with Julia's name. I'd never been a threat to his future with Julia; that wasn't possible. But he didn't know it, and maybe I might have been if things had been different; that much he'd sensed. Now — his chin and beard lifted high, gri

But more than Pickering, I thought about Julia, silent here beside me. I didn't believe she was a girl who wanted to be possessed the way Jake thought he possessed her. And I knew, knew, she couldn't live out her life and be happy with the kind of degraded human spirit that is able to blackmail. Yet I had to let it happen. Knowing what I knew about Jake Pickering, I had to smile and act pleased, and let this warm, lovely angry girl beside me marry him, and — it would happen — destroy her life. Dr. Danziger! I said silently, across the years that separated us. Do I have to? But I knew what the answer was: You ca

It wasn't possible to just walk into the house, when we reached it, and go upstairs and to sleep. I hopped out of the sleigh to help Julia, her aunt, and Maud Torrence down, and they walked up the stairs calling good-nights. Felix snapped his reins, and he and Byron left in their sleigh to drive their dates home or wherever they were going. Jake stayed in his sleigh to return it to the livery stable, and I think the women assumed I was riding with him. But when the door closed behind them, I made a little saluting gesture of farewell to Jake, and turned toward the stairs. When Jake flicked his reins and drove off, I turned back and walked quickly on to Third Avenue.

I didn't know where I was going, I only knew I had to think, and I walked along down Third, dark and very nearly deserted, for several blocks. But the wind was much stiffer now, the temperature sharply lower and still dropping, I thought. It was snowing again but now it was a hard pelletlike snow, nicking into my face with the wind, gritty underfoot. It wasn't a good night for walking, and at Sixteenth Street I looked back over my shoulder, and a streetcar was trundling along toward me, the horse's head bent to the wind, the kerosene lanterns flickering at the front of the car.

It stopped for me, I got on the front platform, and the horse leaned into his collar, his metal-shod hoofs slipping and sliding heavily in the snow till we got rolling again. Tonight, in this kind of weather with very few passengers, it was a bobtail car, a term I'd heard Byron Doverman use, meaning there was no conductor. Here on the open platform where the driver could watch it hung a fare box, and I dropped in my nickel, opened the door, and stepped in, closing the door against the wind. There was only one other passenger, a derby-hatted, walrus-mustached man reading the Evening Sun. I walked down the aisle, crunching dirty wet straw under my feet, and sat down. The tin-shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling smoked badly, and the kerosene smell was very strong.

We rolled along through the windy night and I sat staring absently out at the shabby little Third Avenue stores, a few with dim gaslights far back in the interiors, many with hitching posts and tin-roofed canopies over the walks; some of the blocks we passed through looked like sets in a Western movie. I'd seen all this before and in a way it wasn't much to look at. And yet I stared, never really tired of looking at, never entirely losing the thrill and wonder at being here in, this strange New York.

I once talked with a friend who'd spent a vacation in Paris; like most people he'd loved the city, walking it every day till his legs trembled, pleased with nearly everything he saw. But it wasn't till he'd been there nearly two weeks that one morning Paris and its people suddenly became something more than a background for his vacation, He was sitting in a cafe, out on the walk, having a tiny cup of Paris-tasting, Paris-smelling coffee, watching traffic stream by, pleased as always with the countless people on bikes expertly threading their way between and around the cars and buses and trucks. Then a traffic light changed, the stream stopped and waited, and a man on a bike, one foot on the pavement, lifted his arm and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And he turned real. In that instant he was no longer a quaint part of a charming background; he turned into a real man, tired from pumping that bike, and for the first time it occurred to my friend that there was a reason so many people picturesquely rode bikes through the heavy traffic, and the reason was to save bus fare and because they couldn't afford cars. After that, for the few days that were left to him there, my friend continued to enjoy Paris. But now it was no longer an immense travel poster but a real city, because now so were its people.

Here in the Third Avenue car, my feet ankle-deep in dirty straw but still cold, toes a little numb, I caught a glimpse — through the window of the closed door ahead — of the driver as he drew back on the reins to bring the car to a stop. A middle-aged woman, her face as Irish as an anti-Irish cartoon on a back page of most any Harper's Weekly, climbed aboard. She wore a heavy knitted shawl over her gray hair that covered her shoulders too; she had no other coat; she carried a basket on one arm. As she opened the door, the cold air rolling in and stirring the straw in the aisle, I heard the horse's hoofs slipping and clattering for a purchase, heard the crack of the driver's whip, and just as the door closed I saw the driver's body move as he stamped his feet, hearing the muffled sound of it, and he suddenly turned real for me as I understood how cold he must be out there on that open platform.