Somewhere in Time (3 page)

I like this place but obviously I won't be staying more than several days. What would be the point?

In a few days, I'll get up one morning and start off for Denver and all points east.

And one point west.

Don't be maudlin, Collier.

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Four twenty-seven a.m. Just got up to get a drink of water. Don't like that chlorine taste at all. Wish I had some Sparklett's like at home.

Home?

November 15, 1971

Seven oh one a.m. Tried to get up. Rose, dressed, rinsed my face off, brushed my teeth, took vitamins et al. Back in bed immediately thereafter. Headache too much to cope with.

Shame too. Gorgeous day-what I can see of it through slitted eyes. Blue sky, ocean. Empty strand of sunlit beach. Cool, crisp air.

Can't talk.

Eight fifty-six a.m. Patio very quiet in the morning sun. Looking down across the railing at the green, green lawns, immaculately cared-for shrubbery, square planter in the middle, lampposts on each side of it. White tables, chairs. Across the red-roofed top of the hotel, I see the ocean.

Nine oh six a.m. Breakfast in the Coronet Room. Black coffee and a shred of toast. Twelve other diners.

Too bright in here. The room is wavering in front of me.

The waitress enters and departs my field of vision from and to the lemon-jello haze I see. Don't know why I came here. Could have called room service.

Slit-eyed Mr. Dishrag mumbling to his microphone.

Later. Don't know what time it is, don't care. Back on my back again. Transition a blur. Think I slept. Or fainted.

Yow! Those airplanes come down so low. Just caught sight of it. What's it doing, landing on the beach?

Must be an airport nearby.

Ten thirty-seven a.m. Lying in bed, looking at the San Diego Union. Don't remember buying it. Must have been in a fog before. Lucky I got back at all.

Paper in its hundred and fourth year. Long time.

Decided I wasn't going to keep up with the world but here I am doing it. Peking on our neck already. Mariner Nine locates a hot spot on Mars. The last coastline protection bill axed in Sacramento.

Forget it, Collier. You can do without the news of the day.

Tomorrow's a new moon. That's all you need to know.

I'm taking a walk, inhaling fresh, clean ocean air. The smell is marvelous. I'm walking just below the tower-there's a ballroom down there, I've discovered. To my left is an Olympic pool; blue, glittering water. I see folded-over lounges lined up on the other side; cabanas, Ping-Pong tables. All deserted.

A great day. Warm sun, blue sky, puffy clouds.

I'm walking by the tennis courts. A quartet of women is playing doubles; a vision of short white skirts and skin like leather. Out beyond lies the beach. A hundred yards to the low, white, foaming surf.

I'm looking at the hotel now, a massive structure, tower like a giant minaret, eight-sided, each side with two rows of small bay windows, on top what looks like an observation tower. Wonder if guests are allowed up there.

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I'm walking back. A modern, highrise building over there; must be condominiums or something. They look odd in contrast to this hotel.

I'm looking at an old brick tower across the way. At what must have been the hotel boathouse long ago, now a restaurant. At what seems to be an unused railroad track. I presume trains came around the strand in those days, bringing guests.

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I'm sitting in the old bar room; it's called the Casino Lounge. Closed for business; very still. The counter must be fifty feet long, beautifully formed and finished. At a corner of it is what looks like a shrine, inside of it the figure of what seems to be a Moor, carrying a light.

How many shoes have worn away that brass rail?

I was looking, just a while ago, at photographs of movie stars who've stayed here. June Haver. Robert Stack. Kirk Douglas. Eva Marie Saint. Ronald Reagan. Donna Reed. Back to the beauties of the Pola Negri company, back to Mary Pickford, back to Marie Callahan of the Ziegfeld Follies. How this place does go back.

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Let me record the moment: eleven twenty-six a.m.

Returning across the patio, en route to my room, I saw a sign announcing a Hall of History in the basement.

Intriguing place. Photographs as in the Arcade. A sample bedroom from the 1890s or the early 1900s. Display cases of historic objects from the hotel-a dish, a menu, a napkin ring, an iron, a telephone, a hotel register.

And in one of the cases is a program for a play performed in the hotel theater (wherever that was) on November 20, 1896; The Little Minister by J. M. Barrie, starring an actress named Elise McKenna. Next to the program is a photograph of her face; the most gloriously lovely face I've ever seen in my life.

I've fallen in love with her.

Typical of me. Thirty-six years old, a crush here and a crush there, a random scattering of affairs that mimicked love. But nothing real, nothing that endured.

Then, having reached a terminal condition, I proceed to lose my heart, at long last, to a woman -who's been dead for at least twenty years.

Good show, Collier.

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That face is haunting me.

I went back again to stare at it; stood in front of the display case for such a long time that a man who was, periodically, walking in and out of a nearby employee's entrance started looking at me as though he were wondering if I'd taken root there.

Elise McKenna. Lovely name. Exquisite face.

How I would have loved to sit in the theater (it was in the Ballroom, I discovered from a museum photograph) watching her perform. She must have been superb.

How do I know? Maybe she was rotten. No, I don't believe that.

Seems to me I've heard her name before. Didn't she do Peter Pan? If she's the one I think she is, she was a splendid actress.

She certainly was a beautiful one.

No, it's more than beauty. It's the expression on her face that haunts and conquers me. That gentle, honest, sweet expression. I wish I could have met her.

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I'm lying here, staring at the ceiling like a lovesick boy. I've found my dream woman.

An apt description. Where else could she exist but in my dreams?

Well, why not? My dream woman has always been unavailable to me. What difference does a mere three-quarters of a century make?

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I can't do anything but think about that face. Think about Elise McKenna and what she was like.

I should be dealing with Denver, my projected odyssey. Instead, I lie here like a lump, her face imprinted on my mind. I've been down there three more times. An obvious attempt to escape reality. Mind refusing to accept the present, turning to the past.

But .. . oh, my soul, I feel, at this moment, like the butt of some sadistic practical joke. I have no desire whatever to commiserate with myself but--Jesus God!-to toss a coin, drive more than a hundred miles to a city I've never seen, get off a freeway on a nervous whim, cross a bridge to find a hotel I didn't know existed, and see, there, the photograph of a woman dead these many years and, for the first time in my life, feel love?

What is it Mary always says? Too much for the heart?

My sentiment exactly.

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I've gone walking on the beach. I've had a drink in the Victorian Lounge. I've stared at her photograph again. I've gone back to the beach and sat on the sand and stared at the surf.

To no avail. I can't escape the feeling. With fraying shreds of rationality I realize (I do!) that I'm looking for something to hold on to, that the something doesn't even have to be real, and that Elise McKenna has become that something.

No help to realize it. This thing is burgeoning inside me; becoming an obsession. When I was in the Hall of History before, it took all my willpower not to break the glass on that display case, snatch her photograph, and run.

Hey! An idea! Something I can do about it. Nothing that will stop it, nothing that won't ultimately make it worse in all likelihood but something concrete I can do instead of mooning around.

I'll drive to a local bookstore or, more likely, one in San Diego and locate some books about her. I'm sure there must be one or two at least. That program down there refers to her as "the famous American actress."

I'll do it! Find out everything I can about my long-lost love. Lost? All right, all right. About my love who never knew she was my love because she didn't become my love until after she was dead.

I wonder where she's buried. I just shuddered. The vision of her being buried chills me. That face dead?

Impossible.

I remember, at college, that my landlady (the local Christian Science practitioner and all of eighty-seven herself) took care of a ninety-six-year-old woman for whom she'd worked in the past. This older woman, Miss Jenny, was completely bedridden. She was paralyzed, she was deaf, she was blind, she wet her bed, she was more vegetable than animal. My roommate and I-I feel shame about it now- used to break up when she called out in her frail, quavering voice, "Hoo hoo, Miss Ada! I want to get up!" Those words only, day and night, from the lips of a woman who couldn't possibly get up.

One day, when I went into Miss Ada's living room to use her telephone, I noticed a photograph of a lovely young woman in a high-neck dress, her hair long and dark and glossy; Miss Jenny when she was young. And the strangest feeling of disorientation took hold of me. Because that young woman attracted me while, at the same moment, I could hear Miss Jenny in the nearby bedroom calling out, in her ancient voice, in her blindness and her deafness and her total helplessness, that she wanted to get up. It was a moment of chilling ambivalence, one I couldn't cope with very well at nineteen.

I still can't cope with it.

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The valet got my car and drove it to the front of the hotel. It's only been parked since yesterday afternoon but it looks strange to me; more like an artifact than a possession. It seems even stranger driving it. Overnight I've lost the feel. I called a few bookstores in Coronado; they had nothing. The place to go, I was told, was Wahrenbrock's in San Diego. The valet told me how to get there: Cross the bridge, go north on the freeway, exit at Sixth, drive down to Broadway.

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On the bridge now. I can see the city ahead; mountains in the distance. Odd sensation in me: that the farther I get from the hotel, the farther I get from Elise McKenna. She belongs to the past. So does the hotel. It's like a sanctuary for the care and protection of yesterday.

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Not much traffic on the freeway. There's a sign ahead: Los Angeles. They're trying to deceive me into thinking that it still exists.

Sixth Avenue exit up ahead.

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Later. On my way back, ready to jump clear out of my skin. Christ, I'm nervous. San Diego really got to me. The pace, the crowds, the din, the grinding pulsing presentness of it. I feel uprooted, dazed.

Thank God I found the bookstore easily and thank God it was an oasis of peace in that desert of Now. Under any other condition, I might have stayed there for hours, browsing through its thousands upon thousands of volumes, its two floors plus basement of collected fascinations.

I had a quest, however, and a need to get back to the hotel. So I bought whatever was available; not too much, I'm afraid. The man there said that, as far as he knew, there was no book exclusively about Elise McKenna. I guess she wasn't that important then. Not to the public anyway, not to history. To me, she's all-important.

I see the hotel in the distance and a burst of longing fills me. I wish I could convey the sense of coming home I feel.

I'm back, Elise.

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In my room now; just past three o'clock. Incredible the strong sensation I experienced when I entered the hotel. It didn't have to build as it did yesterday; it came upon me with a rush. Instantly, I was immersed in it and comforted by it-the past embracing me. I can describe it in no other way.

I read an article, once, about astral projection: the trips the so-called immaterial body we are said to possess makes when we're asleep. My experience seems similar. It was as though, in driving to San Diego, I left a part of me behind, fastened to the hotel's atmosphere, the other part connected to it by a long, thin, stretching cord. While I was in San Diego, that cord was stretched to its thinnest and least effective, making me vulnerable to the impact of the present.

Then, as I returned, the cord began to shorten and, thickening, was able to transmit to me more of that comforting atmosphere. When I caught sight of the hotel's towering structure looming above the distant trees, I almost cried aloud with joy. Almost, hell. I did cry out.

Now I'm back and peace has been regained. Surrounded by this timeless castle on the sands, I most certainly will never again go to San Diego.

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Writing again, listening to Mahler's Fifth on my headphones; Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Beautiful; I love it.

To the books, though.

The first one is by John Fraser, called Luminaries of the American Theatre. I'm looking at a two-page entry on her. There is a row of photos at the top of the left-hand page which show her from childhood to old age. Already I'm disturbed to see that lovely face grow old from left to right.

In the second row are three larger photographs: one of her quite old, one quite young; and one that's similar to the photograph in the Hall of History-that frank, exquisite face, the long hair falling to her shoulders; the way she appeared in The Little Minister.

In the third row of photographs, she is wearing a lovely costume, her hands folded delicately on her lap; this from a play called Quality Street. Next to that is a shot of her as Peter Pan (she did play it, then), wearing what looks like an army camouflage suit and a feathered hat, blowing those same pipes that are being blown by Pan on that wooden chair downstairs.

In the bottom row are photographs of her as other characters she played: L'Aiglon, Portia, Juliet; my God, a rooster yet in Chanticleer.

On the opposite page, a full-page photograph of her face in profile. I don't like it. For that matter, I don't care for any of these photographs. None of them possess the quality in the photograph I first saw. Which evokes a strange sensation. If that photograph had been like one of these, I would have passed by, feeling nothing.