Out of Time Read online

  In the second, the owner of Fellini’s Restaurant caught up with me. The letter said, “We’ve been looking for you for three years. The jig is up.” The owner looked a lot like the head of the English Department at school.

  In the third, the shopkeeper had hired a detective to track me down. The detective bore a striking resemblance to my first lover.

  In the fourth, my mother notified me by certified mail that she and my father were disinheriting me, “because you’ve been nothing but an embarrassment as a daughter. We heard about your recent arrest for theft. Signed, Your Mother.”

  In the last, or the last that I remembered, I got a yellowed photograph of “Me and Harriet” in the mail. Their faces peeked out of the envelope coyly, smiling.

  • • •

  On Monday morning I stood on line at the post office for a half hour. The clerk was unusually slow, and the fact that the line was ten people deep didn’t seem to bother him. As I approached the window, he excused himself and took, I assumed, a bathroom break.

  “Yes?” he said when he returned, as if it were odd to find people waiting on line at his window. I shoved the yellow slip at him roughly, and he took his time finding the envelope.

  In the last seconds before he returned to the window, I thought I was going to be sick. I was sure I was going to have to leave the line and find a bathroom or at least some alley where I could throw up. But then he came back, envelope in hand. I tried to read the address through the window, but my eyesight is even worse upside down than it is rightside up.

  “Identification,” he demanded. “Please sign here,” he finished, after comparing my driver’s license photo with my face.

  Finally, he handed the envelope through the window. This, I thought as I grabbed it, could change the rest of my life.

  I was right, in a sense. Because my landlord had raised my rent by ten percent.

  3

  It took about four weeks for me to decide that the shopkeeper was not after me. It was a hard decision to come to, but after I had made it I realized that I no longer remembered exactly what day I had been there or where the shop was. It was as if the scrapbook had come to me in a dream, that I had invented it, and then it appeared under my bed. In fact, I very nearly said to myself, “Oh, look what I found!” when I finally pulled the book from its hiding place.

  The thrill of looking through it the second time was even greater than the first, and the third time was even better than both put together. It was on the third pass that I found the courage to lift the photos carefully out of their mounting corners and flip them over.

  “Me” had written what she hadn’t had room for on the front: the names of the women and the dates the pictures were taken.

  It was on the fourth trip through the scrapbook that I was finally able to read those names.

  Elinor Devere.

  Harriet Timberlake.

  Sarah Stern.

  Lucy Weir.

  1918.

  1920.

  1926.

  1927. And nothing later.

  By the fifth pass I was in love with each and every one of them. I memorized their individual smiles. I could mimic the way Harriet raised her left eyebrow slightly in a flirtation with the camera. I had picked out Elinor’s nervous habit of rubbing the cuticle of her thumb with her index finger. I recognized Sarah as an ardent feminist. I had determined that Lucy had been in love with Harriet for a long time.

  On the sixth perusal, I became convinced that I had been the photographer.

  “Smile, ladies,” I said. “Say pretty please.”

  “Pretty pu-lease,” said Harriet.

  “Pretty please hurry,” said Elinor.

  “Please,” said Sarah, “can’t you ever remember that women are more than just pretty?”

  “Harriet,” said Lucy.

  During the seventh pass, I realized the obvious: that Elinor and Sarah were a couple. It seemed to me that I had known this fact all along but had simply forgotten it while taking the pictures. I had been so caught up in the moment, I had actually asked Elinor to have dinner with me.

  “And Sarah, too?” she had asked.

  “Why, of course,” I replied, embarrassed at my lapse of memory.

  Then Elinor leaned over and kissed Sarah on the cheek, and something in the way she did it made me think of Catherine.

  Harriet slipped her arm through mine, making it difficult to manage the camera. Hesitantly, I took the shot without her in it.

  “And what is the name of that delightful partner of yours?” she asked, squeezing my arm ever so slightly. “The beautiful history teacher?”

  “Catherine,” I answered, advancing the film. “Catherine Synge.”

  “Catherine Synge,” she repeated, melodically. “Catherine Synge. Harriet Timberlake.”

  I turned and caught on film the moment when she said her own name.

  Lucy took my other arm. “Now me,” she demanded, and I obliged. She pulled off her hat and shook her auburn hair. “Capture me for history.”

  The camera turned into the scrapbook in my hands. I felt the smooth leather cautiously, aware that it contained the future as well as the past.

  • • •

  I began to go to them in daydreams. I went to them with questions on my lips.

  What was it like for you then?

  Where was your work? What did you eat? What books did you cry over? What was a kiss like in 1926? How did women find each other?

  How did I find you?

  “Silly girl,” said Harriet, with a smile that melted butter, “we found you.”

  • • •

  “What’s this?” Catherine asked, from the living room. I was chopping vegetables at the kitchen counter, watching her anxiously as she made her way to the coffee table and touched the leather scrapbook with one soft hand. “Susan,” she said, unaware that I had waited for this moment for weeks, “what’s this?”

  “Open it up,” I said, trying to be casual but nearly chopping my finger into the eggplant.

  I thought she gave a little gasp as she opened it, but it was probably me. She had only turned two or three pages when she said, “Where did you find this?”

  “At an antiques store downtown,” I answered, giving up the chopping to stand beside her as she lingered over the pages. “It was raining.”

  She nodded as if to say she understood. “Who are they?”

  I recited their names in a litany.

  “Oh,” she said. Then, “1920. 1926.”

  “Yes,” I said, aware all along that she would know the dates exactly, without having to look at the backs of the photos.

  She closed the cover gently. “I can’t remember,” she said, “when I’ve heard of something this extraordinary. Finding a lesbian scrapbook in an antiques shop.”

  I smiled.

  “They’re just beautiful,” Catherine said, opening the cover again.

  “Catherine,” said Harriet and Lucy in unison. “Catherine Synge.”

  • • •

  I kept the scrapbook on the shelf with the other lesbian books I had collected. The vitality of Lucy, Harriet and The Gang seemed to give new life to them. Sometimes, when I was in the bedroom, I heard some unexplained racket in the living room and became convinced that it was The Gang, having a little get-together on the bookshelf.

  The women didn’t live for Catherine the way they did for me, but I shared the book with her anyway. She was, after all, a historian of women, rational but sensitive all at the same time. But I was hesitant to tell her the experience I was having with The Gang. Catherine had related many stores about growing up in her traditional Irish family, in which her immigrant grandmother talked a lot about spirits and saints and other seemingly fantastic things. She had rebelled against it at a young age; and even though she felt she had a deeper appreciation of her culture now, she still drew the line at all things magical. Partly because of that, she’d gone into history, the discipline that depends on fact.

 
We spent many evenings those first few weeks at my apartment pouring over the scrapbook. It was now my favorite thing to do. I refused to travel with the book, I was afraid of loose photographs falling out all over Manhattan. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing even one mounting corner.

  Our ritual on those evenings was to bring in dinner and eat it quickly while filling each other in on our days. Then Catherine made a pot of tea, we curled up together on the couch, and I brought the scrapbook from the shelf. It was better than a Katherine Hepburn movie on TV, better than reading books together as we fell asleep in bed.

  Catherine noticed everything. She had an eye for detail in photographs. She could describe the texture of their clothes. She could tell how old a picture was by the length of someone’s skirt. She could read the fine print on a book Harriet was holding in one of the photographs.

  “It looks like The Intrepid Ones,” Catherine said, her nose just inches from the photo. I was sure that Harriet would say something to complain, but she didn’t. “Mean anything to you?”

  It was a title I probably would have pulled off a bookshelf to inspect, but I did not remember ever doing so. “It sounds a little like a sixties TV show,” I laughed.

  Catherine squinted at the photograph in a way that must have been less than attractive from Harriet and Lucy’s end. “There’s a name, too,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb into the shot, walk up to Harriet, and say, “Excuse me, that sounds like an interesting book. May I ask who the author is?”

  “If you have a magnifying glass,” Catherine said instead, “I could probably make it out.”

  I had one that had come with the Oxford English Dictionary I had ordered from one of my book clubs. Catherine moved it up and down over the photo, zooming it back and forth to get a clearer view. I wanted to suggest we just ask Harriet, but Catherine was having fun playing the detective historian. “Well, whaddya know,” she said, freezing the magnifying glass in place. Before she said anything, I felt I knew the answer. Because just a second before Catherine told me, Harriet had whispered in my ear.

  “Lucy Warner Weir,” they both said, a second apart.

  It was Catherine’s idea to begin researching the women in the scrapbook. She said it would be easy, not like her own work, which had involved trips to Boston and once overseas. I could just go halfway to her house, to the Public Library. I already knew their names and the approximate time they lived. And now I knew that Lucy was an author. I could probably find the book somewhere. Maybe it could form the basis of my dissertation. She said it would be fun.

  It all seemed like a lot of work to me, because I was convinced they would tell me their stories eventually and far more accurately than written records could. Catherine had no interest in taking on another research project, because she was deeply involved in her own projects, especially the same work on Irish women’s immigration she’d been doing when we met. And I knew she would find it hard to justify doing research on privileged, middle-class women, even if they were lesbians. Catherine’s work had all focused on the working class, where her roots were. Her mother had worked all her life as a waitress, and her father drove a cab. “I could help, though,” she said. “You could do a whole exhibit around these photos, maybe for Gay Pride Week.”

  I smiled hesitantly. I was not so sure I wanted to share them. I found it a little comforting that even Catherine couldn’t speak to them directly. I was concerned about it, because Harriet was very flirtatious and had described Catherine as beautiful. She was most beautiful now while she was thinking quickly, more quickly than she could get the words out of her mouth. She sat twisting one end of her long red hair, the way she did in her most intense moments, her deep green eyes darting back and forth as if she were watching pictures in her head. A faint smile parted her lips. She was thinking about history, and for a moment time melted away. I wondered if Harriet was whispering her name, and I felt jealous because I couldn’t hear anything.

  Then she was back. “You could get your dissertation out of this. Yes, I really think you should do it,” Catherine said decisively. “You’ve been entrusted with history, Susan. It’s your responsibility.”

  I sighed. “Maybe,” I said, “maybe they wouldn’t like being exposed like that.”

  Catherine laughed a high-pitched giggle unlike her own. I am sure it was really Harriet’s. “Oh, come on,” she said, holding up a photo of Harriet and Lucy with their arms linked, their playful eyes teasing the camera. “These women are begging to be exposed.”

  I had to agree. Because as she held the photo up, Harriet winked at me.

  • • •

  The next morning, after Catherine had left for her teaching job, I was taking some last bites of toast before I had to be off, too. I stood staring down at the open scrapbook on my coffee table.

  “Ladies,” I said, “Catherine’s right. You’ve entrusted me with history. I’m the caretaker of your lives. You’ve got to help me out with this. We’re in this together.”

  There was no answer. Perhaps they were still asleep. In fact, I heard a yawn that was not my own. Through the yawn, I thought I heard someone say, “All right.”

  4

  I was in the second year of the doctoral program in English at Columbia. It was, I thought, what I had always wanted. My whole life pointed toward literature and writing, starting at about age seven, when I began to write stories. I had no idea what my dissertation topic would be, and I had no idea what I would do with this degree if I ever finished it. Probably stack the diploma in the closet with the others, the B.A. and teaching certificate from the University of Chicago, the M.F.A. in writing from San Francisco State, the M.B.A. from Fordham. I had crisscrossed the country stacking up degrees I never used, or at least not for more than a few months at a time. In between, I supported myself with substitute teaching assignments, telemarketing jobs, stints as a waitress, and loans from Grandmother Van Dine. I owed her close to twenty thousand dollars by the time I was thirty. I owed the government even more in student loans.

  As a teaching assistant, I had to teach one freshman English composition class. Then I spent a lot of time grading papers from an associate professor’s American lit survey. It was all very routine and not too interesting. The students were bright enough but smart-mouthed, at the age when they believed that being freshmen at Columbia made them a special breed. Most of them took English because it was required, not out of any love for the language and how it’s put together. More often than not, a fifth of the students enrolled in the class didn’t show up. Sometimes I thought it was no better than teaching in a public high school, except that I didn’t fear for my life. I often thought I would be much happier across the street at Barnard, where at least I might have had some young lesbians in my class, or at City College, where less privileged students were more appreciative of the learning process.

  After I found the scrapbook, I began to prepare for class less and less and to give in-class writing assignments more and more. It required little effort on my part, except that I had to listen to the students’ groans and sighs. I gave them topics from classes I had had as a student. Then they wrote for thirty minutes, and we spent fifteen minutes hearing people’s reactions to the assignment. Then I collected them and read them quickly at lunch, checking for nouns and verbs. I am not sure they were learning anything except how to write under pressure. But I was allowing myself more time to daydream about Lucy and her gang.

  It was in the middle of one of my reveries that Lucy said, “If you can’t do it anymore, you might as well quit.”

  The thought had occurred to me, but I hadn’t entertained it for too long. What would I do this time? Had I finally had my fill of school? Had it ceased to challenge me? Catherine had been so supportive of this degree. When Catherine and I met, we were both doing volunteer work for a feminist newspaper. She wrote pithy news articles, and I kept the books. I pursued her until she noticed me. But I was finishing up my M.B.A., and Catherine wasn’t sur
e she could, in good conscience, go out with anyone in business school who was, she suspected, trying to get a niche in the male establishment.

  But my motivation for going to business school had won her over. “It’s just a diversion,” I explained. “I wanted to see how the other half thinks. I’ll never use it.”

  And true to my word, I hadn’t. You hardly need an M.B.A. to sell credit card theft protection plans by phone.

  “I think,” Catherine decided, “you should go on for your doctorate. You’ll just wander aimlessly till you do.”

  I had to agree with her. Catherine was brilliant, someone who had made the most out of a minimum of degrees. She had been teaching high school history since graduating from Hunter College, which she had worked her way through. She had started an M.A. in night school, but gave it up because it was too structured and didn’t allow enough time for the research projects she wanted to do. Most of her advanced knowledge was picked up casually, through voracious reading. She had also spent a lot of time talking to older people on the Lower East Side, rummaging through their photos, recording their lives, and putting them into exhibits.

  But she knew me very well. She knew I did not have that kind of self-direction. I belonged in graduate school; I was the sort of person for whom it was invented. I needed a dissertation hanging over my head to get me to work. Without it I would spend my days serving lunches to business executives, my nights pasted in front of the TV with the remote control firmly in my hand.

  I trusted Catherine’s knowledge of me. I trusted her recommendations. I valued her opinion and feared her disapproval. She was, after all, a minor genius, who had chosen me as her lover and hadn’t left me yet. So it was with a great deal of difficulty that I walked into the office of the chair of the English Department and announced that I needed a leave of absence, starting immediately. Seven months, I said, just summer term and fall semester. Why? I couldn’t say I’m bored, I’m distracted, so I told the only other truth there was. “For a research project,” I said. “It will take all my time for seven months.”