Time and Again

Up ahead a man in a derby, wearing a heavy pullover sweater, the top of his gray winter underwear visible at the neck, came ru

During my time in the army I was taught how to use your eyes at night; you don't look directly at what you're trying to see. Instead you look off to the side at something else; then, from the corner of your eye, what you really want to see will come clearer. Sometimes the mind works in the same indirect way when you let a problem alone, not forcing an answer. I walked over to Broadway, found a hansom at the Metropolitan Hotel, and by the time I got back to Gramercy Park I knew what I had to do.

It was a long ride up the dark deserted business section of Broadway, but I was out of the wind, wrapped to the waist in a heavy fur robe that was a little mangy, a little smelly, but after a while cozy and warm. The steady unvarying clap-clop, clap-clop, clap-clop of the horse's hoofs, muffled by the steamed-over window glass, was hypnotic, and the thoughts rose in my mind without effort. The city had been a magical place earlier this evening, filled with sleighs and the sound of singing and genuine laughter. But now late at night I understood that it was also the city of the streetcar driver I'd just talked to. And that while I'd been dashing through Central Park in Jake's sleigh, countless lost children were hunting places to sleep at the bottoms of East River hay barges. And now the city was no longer only an exotic background to my own strange adventure. Now it was real, and now I finally understood that I was really here in these times, and that these people were alive. And that so was Julia.

Observe, don't interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project… where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality, nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia's life wasn't long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn't stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn't do it here either.

Would it be destroyed? I thought about it, and the cab swung off Broadway at Union Square, toward Fourth Avenue, and I wiped the mist from the window with a sleeve, and saw a theater sign under glowing yellow globes: TONY PASTOR'S NEW 14TH STREET THEATRE, it said, and on easel posters at every entrance PATIENCE; OR, THE STAGE-STRUCK MAIDEN. SEE MISS LILLIAN RUSSELL! A GRATIFYING SUCCESS; AN ARTISTIC GEM, and I had an impulse to stop and see the last of the play, but I had too much to think about. Even though I'd known Julia only a matter of hours, actually, I was certain I knew something about her. If you have the ability to make a true portrait of someone, you will learn more about her in the making of it than you otherwise might over days and even weeks of casual acquaintance. I've always appreciated the story you read now and then about the psychiatrist — he would have been called an alienist then — who stood staring at a portrait painted by Sargent or Whistler, I don't remember which. It was a portrait of a man who had been his patient, and after the alienist had studied it for twenty minutes he nodded, and said, "Now I understand what was wrong with him." Well, I'm not Whistler or Sargent, I haven't their talent or insight. But to capture the person on paper or canvas you must observe more than the camera can see. And — yes, I did know that for the particular person who was Julia Charbo

The consequences to the future of interference with the past? I shrugged: There were always consequences to any future of every act in the past. To affect the course of an event in my own time was to affect still another future unimaginably, yet we all did it every moment of our lives. And now the future which was my own time was going to have to take its chances. Because now I knew that I just wasn't going to let Julia go down the drain as though somehow she didn't matter but we did. I swayed as the cab turned onto Twentieth Street, and then a block later onto Gramercy Park. And as it slowed and stopped before Number 19, I was smiling: I knew now that I was going to find a way somehow to break Julia's engagement to Jake Pickering; and who could say, it had occurred to me, that the consequences to my own time, if any, wouldn't be an improvement? It was a time that could stand some.

18

I was out on the streets in the morning right after a breakfast I could hardly sit still long enough to eat. Aunt Ada served it, along with the Times, but I didn't even try to read; I couldn't do anything, really, but think over and over, This is the day. Tonight at twelve Pickering and Carmody would meet in City Hall Park. Nothing could keep me from being there too, and I felt I knew intuitively that I was finally going to know what the note in the blue envelope meant."…the Destruction by Fire of the entire World… " The words were senseless, they didn't mean anything, only — they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them.

I don't know how I could have been so stupid — so just plain dumb — but it seemed to me I had nothing to do but fill in the day somehow till it was time to leave for the meeting in the park. I went upstairs and got Felix's camera from his room; he'd said I could, urged me, in fact, and last night at Gabe Case's had repeated the offer. The camera used dry plates which he kept in a box in his closet. He had two dozen of them, so I filled his little varnished-wood carrying case with them. It held ten, and I put another in the camera; there were pictures all over town that I wanted.

Manhattan Island is small; you can cover it from one end to the other in a day, so I took the El down to the Battery first. There was a wait for the train, and I got all focused; the camera had a sliding bellows of red leather, very nice to adjust. I stood waiting for a train then, and out of nowhere a sudden stab of worry pricked my mind: Was there something I ought to be doing, of the utmost importance, instead of this? But the platform was trembling minutely, far down the tracks a train had appeared — from downtown, but it didn't matter to my shot — and I had the camera up, holding it steady till the train moved into focus. This is the shot I got, and by the time I had it and had changed plates, the unresolved doubt had drifted from my mind.

Battery Park was pleasant; a lot of snow, but the paths had been cleared. I saw a scattering of newly arrived immigrants there, getting their first look at the country, and I couldn't resist a shot of them.

I took the El up to the Brooklyn Bridge then — a real tourist — and climbed the tower by a set of wooden ladders, careful never to look down till I stepped out onto the top of the tower. Without giving myself any chance to think, I started right on across a little temporary wooden suspension bridge strung high over the unfinished permanent roadway. But the thing swayed! The handhold was nothing but thin cable-wire, and there wasn't a thing, if you tripped, to keep you from falling off and down, down, down. It was impossibly high, swinging in a chill winter breeze. With my eyes on the wooden planking along which my feet shuffled, hardly daring to lift, I couldn't help Looking between the cracks — at the lead gray river infinitely far below and the horribly empty spaces of the roadway. Ten steps, and I couldn't go on. I turned around, and two men were walking toward me. There was no room to sidle past them and back to the tower; if I tried I knew I'd fall.