From Time to Time (16 page)

If asked your age,

Or name,

Or views,

On anything in life,

Or "Where's your home?

Or "How's your health?

Or "Have you got a wife?

Or, "Tell me do, What's two plus two?

Don't answer. Simply chant:

"I'm fully,

Quite fully,

Blissfully ignorant. Ho hum.

Jack Dorman had knocked out Young Cashman last night, a society couple was divorcing, and Wall Street was "shocked at a stock exchange scandal. So ho hum again. Was 1912 just like today? Couldn't be. The news people make, the things they do, Dr. Danziger had once taught me, remain essentially the same in every time. But in the ways people think, feel, and believe . every time is different. So I began to hunt for the people of 1912 between the lines of the routine news they made.

And began to find them. A first hint, I thought, of the way people once felt and believed showed up in a Saks ad headed, Resolutions for You and for Us. Below that, a long column of sentiments like these: "To bear failure with courage, and success with humility . . . To whine a little less and work a little more .

To speak in small type and think in capitals . . . To remember that the echo of a knock reacts on the knocker. And so on and so on, a column of stuff like that, almost unbearably trite to our eyes, followed only by the Saks signature.

And yet, I sat thinking, a copywriter in an early ad agency, and a business firm that okayed and paid for that ad must have thought they knew their fellow New Yorkers. So-a first hint?-wasn't this ad published for a people who were ambitious? Hopeful? Cheerful? Optimistic? Certainly not cynical.

And so I began, in this and many another paper, to look for what the people of 1912 had to tell me about themselves. Skipping crime, divorce, and liars under oath, I read the classified ads, and learned that three 1912 people had lost their dogs, whose names were Tammany, Sport, and Bubbles, and whose breeds were "a French bull dog, a "Schipperke, and a "Pug. And when, later that afternoon on my way out from the library, I stopped in Reference to look up Dog in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 1911, I found that photographs of those breeds didn't really look the same as even those same breeds today. And I walked down the library steps onto present-day Fifth Avenue, wondering where to have dinner, with the first beginnings in my mind-knowing what you might see at the end of the leash-of what the sidewalks of New York might be like in 1912.

Every day that week, all day except for lunch and one or two coffee breaks, I sat reading-trying not to think too much of home the Times, the Herald, the World, the Telegram, the Express. Of 1909 . . . 1910 . . . 1911, 12, and 13. And found stories I should have passed by, but didn't have the willpower. And so I learned that Thomas Edison had just invented a way to make furniture out of concrete. Including phonographs. With a photo of one that looked fine to me. But I was also becoming aware of how often I came across references to sheet music. And how often pianos were advertised. Looked like these people made their own music.

A brief account of an accident in which "A Second Avenue trolley car crashed into an Avenue C horsecar at Houston Street and Second Avenue told me that the nineteenth century in which Julia and I lived was colliding with the beginnings of the twentieth.

The Pennsylvania Railroad train to Cleveland carried a library car. Office supply ads illustrating new rolltop desks helped me peek into a 1912 office. An ad headed, "A Demi Unit filing cabinet is a genuine multum in parvo for the private office . . ." said to me that an advertiser felt he could count on 1912 businessmen knowing some Latin. And suggested a vanished kind of schooling which graduated people who knew geography, arithmetic, spelling, American history, some Latin, and maybe even some Greek.

I discovered how the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, Surface and Elevated, thought their 1912 patrons ought to be treated, because they regularly ran ads to tell them what they had left behind. Giving me a glimpse of empty El and streetcar seats on which lay "eyeglasses, small music roll, suitcase, stationery, baby's bottle, derby hats, velvet handbag. Told me they walked out of the cars in their 1912 clothes leaving "a letter file, muff, man's coat, pocketbook, handbags, rubbers, purse, book, knife . . ." And I wondered why champagne was advertised so incessantly. Was it the Coca- Cola of 1912? All of February 1912, I learned from the weather reports, was "unseasonably mild; spring- and almost summerlike, unusual for New York.

Newspapers, magazines, even trade journals. And after a while I got tired of them and of the library, and began bringing books back home. Up to my room in the Plaza elevator with A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter . . . or Cap'n Warren's Wards, by Joseph C. Lincoln. . . Truxton King: A Story of Graustark, by George Barr McCutcheon . . . The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton . . . All with color illustrations on their covers.

And then for a while-mornings after breakfast in the armchair in my room, or on a Central Park bench in the warm part of an afternoon, or sitting up in bed leaning toward the lamp cleverly shaded to keep light from reaching my book-I read things like:

"He was a tall, rawboned, rangy young fellow with a face so tanned by wind and sun you had the impression that his skin would feel like leather if you could affect the impertinence to test it by the sense of touch. Further down the page: "This tall young man in the panama hat and grey flannels was Truxton King, embryo globe-trotter and searcher after the treasures of Romance.

Somewhere up near Central Park, in one of the fashionable cross streets, was the home of his father and his father's father before him: a home which Truxton had not seen in two years or more.

Where had he been? "We come upon him at last-luckily for us we were not actually following him-after two years of wonderful but rather disillusioning adventures in mid-Asia and all Africa. He had seen the Congo and the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Nile, the Yang-tse-kiang and the Yenisei; he had climbed mountains in Abyssinia, in Siam, in Thibet and Afghanistan; he had shot big game in more than one jungle, and had been shot at by small brown men in more than one forest, to say nothing of the little encounters he had had in more un-Occidental towns and cities . . . ~ But: He had found no sign of Romance.

However: "Somewhere out in the shimmering east, he had learned, to his honest amazement, that there was such a land as Graustark. And reaching Graustark, he was soon talking to an old man who "straightened his bent figure with sudden pride. I am an armorer to the crown, sir. My blades are used by the nobility-not by the army, I am happy to say.

" I see. Tradition, I suppose.

" My great-grandfather wrought blades for the princes a hundred years ago. My son will make them after I am gone, and his son after him. I, sir, have made the wonderful blade with the golden hilt and scabbard which the little Prince carries on days of state. It was two years in the making. There is no other blade so fine . . . There are diamonds and rubies worth 50,000 gavvos set in the handle . .

A page or so later Truxton King met "a young woman of most astounding beauty, and "Somewhere back in his impressionable brain there was growing a distinct hope that this beautiful young creature with the dreamy eyes was something more than a mere shopgirl. It had occurred to him in that one brief moment of contact that she had the air, the poise, of a true aristocrat.

Well, I didn't read too much more of that, but what about such a story? Not much like those we watch on television, but is it less believable? Do automobiles, after all, really soar over the crests of hills ten feet above the pavement, landing on their wheels without any problem? The Graustark novels were wildly popular, one after another, in the first years of this century, but I don't suppose the people who read them took them any more seriously than we take most of our entertainment. And when I closed this one-I was sitting on a Central Park bench within sight of the Plaza-I was smiling, but I was also inclined to like the kind of people who liked Truxton King. But are "mere shopgirls really inferior to "true aristocrats ? Was 1912 also a time of easy social prejudice? Unconcerned and unrebuked?

The people I was looking for read more than easy junk: they read Edith Wharton. And in The House of Mirth, which I began back in my room one morning after a coffee shop breakfast, a woman of twenty-nine is waiting in Grand Central Station (I had to stop and think: that was the little brick Grand Central Julia and I knew, not today's) for a train not due for some time. She meets a young man she knows, and accepts his invitation to have tea at his apartment nearby. In the apartment, "Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

" How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self. What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.

The young man replies, " Even women have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.'

" Oh, governesses-or widows. But not girls-not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!'

She leaves the apartment, ". . . but as she reached the sidewalk she ran against a small glossy-looking man with a gardenia in his coat, who raised his hat with a surprised exclamation.

" Miss Bart? Well-of all people! This is luck,' he declared, and she caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his screwed-up lids.

She replies-he is a Mr. Rosedale-and "Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes. .

She feels she mustn't say she was visiting a young man's apartment, and says she was here to visit her dressmaker. But it turns out that he knows there is no dressmaker in the building: he owns the building, and knows that all its tenants are young bachelors.

She hails a cab, and on her way back to the station wonders, "Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She is "vexed with herself be- cause ". . . it would have been SO simple to tell Rosedale that she had been taking tea with Selden! The mere statement of the fact would have rendered it innocuous. She should also have accepted his offer to take her to the station because "the concession might have purchased his silence. He had his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded afternoon hour in [hen company would have been money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it. He knew, of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont, and the possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor's guests was doubtless included in his calculation. Mr. Rosedale was still at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to produce such impressions.~~

Did that tell me something more of how 1912 believed, felt, thought? Even the author herself? I thought so.

Books, newspapers, until finally, late one morning, I understood that they no longer had much left to tell me. Magazines, for a while, then on to old film, projected for me one morning and again the next in the little theater in the Museum of Modern Art; Rube had arranged this for me. And I sat, comfortably slouched, looking up at the old images, seldom very sharp, some being copies of copies. But in the old film the people of 1909, 10, 11, 1912, and 13 actually moved. I sat watching a vanished streetcar roll down a strange Broadway, saw it stop, watched a step unfold, watched women delicately lifting their ankle-length skirts just enough to manage the step. I saw horses trot, and saw them plod tiredly. Watched pedestrians cross the street, saw one man actually running a little, hurrying off the screen on an errand lost to all memorv. In the silent dark I reminded myself that what I watched, moving up there on the screen, had once had its precise duplication in actuality. And I tried to supply the missing sounds and colors: that streetcar had been red.

Stereo views at the Museum of the City of New York, most of these sharply focused, clear, finely detailed. And with them I looked out over the city a lot-at aerial views from various tall buildings looking over the length of the 1912 city toward Central Park; or toward the harbor; on overlooking a riven. And saxv the city -of tall buildings, yes, but not so very tall. And mostly scattered, New York still open and airy, still full of sun and daylight. Occasionally, here and there in some of the views, I'd spot a puff of steam or vapor rising from a roof vent, and that-the frozen instant-would suddenly make the lost city real.

Rube phoned me two or three times, in the late afternoon when I was likely to be in my room. The first time, he suggested dinner, but I said no, I was in the process of separating myself from this time, it was best to be alone. Once he phoned in the morning before I'd gone down for breakfast, wanting a list of my clothing sizes.

One morning-it was drizzling, and I walked along the west side of Fifth Avenue edging as close as I could to the partial protection of Central Park trees-I went up to the Metropolitan Museum for the opening of a new exhibit. And for the rest of the morning and for three more hours, after lunch in the museum restaurant, I moved from one tall glass case to another staring in at models dressed in clothing surviving from 1910-1915. There, tantalizingly just behind the glass, stood some of the absolute reality of those early years-the visible threads and buttons and actual weave of the cloth; the dull gloss of fur; the hard glitter of jewel-like ornamentation; the actuality of feathers, the reality of dye. I knew already from photographs, sketches, and film what kinds of hats women wore in 1912. But now here they really were. Huge cartwheels wide as a woman's shoulders: made of cloth, of woven straw and even fur; plain and decorated with artfully folded and twisted cloth or speckled with jewel-like stones or artificial flowers or fruit. Still other hats without brims, but the crowns oversize, huge, one of them with a pair of actual bird wings cupping the sides. Once the Dove Lady's?

I couldn't get enough of the realness of what I stood staring at. There in case after case hung their very clothes, touchable except for the glass. There hung the blue serge of a skirt once actually worn by a living girl, as they were then, the hem narrowing in just above the ankles. Beside it-surely this had really moved through the lobby of a New York theater at some forgotten play-an evening wraparound cloak of peach-colored satin trimmed with white fur, and it wasn't hard to catch glimpses of it in my mind, moving through a crowded, buzzing lobby. The high-heeled white shoes just below the furred hem of that cloak were like today's except not quite; I think it was something about the heels: they looked- well, funny. And the men's suits-the left shoulder of one almost touched the glass, and I could see the faint fuzz of the tweed- were like today's except that, no, they weren't, everything a little different, the pants cuffs narrower, the lapels . . . different; smaller, I think. And the cloth seemed heavier, and there were more browns than I'd have expected. And the men's hats: the brims of the felt hats were wider but that wasn't all. I didn't know what the other differences were, though I could see them. I wore a derby once in a while, going out with Julia, but these derbies behind the glass here weren't the same. And there were a lot of caps.