Out of Time Read online

  But something told me I had no intention of going back. I emptied my desk in the cubbyhole I shared with another T.A. and went home to lie on my bed and think up something to tell Catherine.

  • • •

  The same day I quit Columbia, I got a package in the mail. It was painstakingly wrapped in layer after layer of heavy brown paper, sealed with waterproof tape, the frustrating kind you try to tear first and then have to cut through to remove. There was no return address. The package was addressed to me with my middle name, which I used only for official papers and my financial records: Susan Abigail Van Dine.

  Inside was a 1922 first edition of The Intrepid Ones. It was in excellent condition, except for some wear at the corners of the cover where it had been repeatedly taken on and off the shelf. Inside was scrawled in faded blue ink, “For H., my partner and friend.”

  Someone had placed a sheet of linen stationery inside. It took a minute for me to realize the note was new, not something from the twenties. It, too, had been written with an old fountain pen.

  “For your collection,” it said. There was no name, but I knew immediately that it was from the shopkeeper. I don’t think Lucy told me. I think I knew simply from the fluttery feeling in my stomach when the dusty smell of the antiques shop wafted up from the folds of the wrapping.

  • • •

  I decided that the best way to avoid Catherine’s disapproval was not to tell her about my leave of absence. I rarely spoke to her during the day, because when she was not in class she was preparing lesson plans or advising the student History Club or off at the Public Library doing her own research. If at night she asked about my day, I could launch into some story of student unrest. I had a good, on-the-spot imagination. I realized she might never have to know I had left at all. And if I were gathering information about Lucy and The Gang, that would satisfy her that I was definitely as busy and hard at work as she was.

  Catherine was getting tired of always coming to my apartment. The novelty of the scrapbook had worn off for her, and she didn’t understand why I wanted to look at it every night.

  “You haven’t been to my place in weeks,” she complained on the phone. “Why do I always have to do the traveling?”

  “I have something to show you,” I said, avoiding her complaint. “I can’t wait for you to see it.”

  “Bring it here,” she said, wearily. “We’ll have dinner out, and you can tell me all about it.”

  “I’m afraid something will happen to it.”

  “Take a cab.” She sighed heavily into the phone. “My treat.”

  “But it goes with the scrapbook,” I insisted. “We need to look at them both to get the full effect.”

  There was a long, important silence from Catherine’s end. “I can’t tonight,” she said finally. “I’m too beat. Maybe tomorrow.”

  I don’t remember begging her to come or calling her Harriet, but she says that I did. And Catherine is almost always right.

  • • •

  In the end, I was relieved that Catherine had stayed home. I was up all night reading The Intrepid Ones. In the morning I went right on reading, as if time had no meaning and the only thing that mattered was finishing the novel. When I finally looked up from the last page, it was evening again and Catherine was calling to say she wouldn’t be over that night either.

  “Are you seeing someone else?” I asked, knowing that she wasn’t.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Are you?”

  “No,” I said, with a sudden warm blush of guilt. Because just as I finished reading, just as the phone was ringing, I had been masturbating with The Intrepid Ones beside me on the bed.

  “I got a copy of The Intrepid Ones,” I blurted out. “I think I got the actual copy Harriet’s holding in the picture.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “How did you do that?”

  “I went back to the shop where I bought the scrapbook,” I lied. I thought Catherine, who had high moral standards, would have left me in a second if she ever found out how I really got the scrapbook. “It was just a hunch. She had a copy—I couldn’t believe it. It’s inscribed ‘For H., my partner and friend.’”

  “That could be anyone,” the historian warned me. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Does it match the writing in the scrapbook?”

  “That was printed, this is in script. But it seems coincidental to me,” I said. “Doesn’t it seem coincidental to you?”

  “You’ll need to find some letters or something to confirm it,” Catherine said, and I imagined her twisting her hair in thought at the other end. “A writer must have left letters. You just need to determine where she would have left them.”

  I was deep in silent protestation. I knew Lucy had written it. I knew without doing research. I opened the cover and ran my index finger over the faded ink of the inscription. “Trust yourself,” I heard someone say, and it wasn’t Catherine.

  • • •

  The Intrepid Ones was the story of a group of career women in New York City in the early 1900s. It was not specifically lesbian, but two of the women lived together in what was known then as a “Boston marriage.” The characters were strong, but the writing was old-fashioned, peppered with dashes and semicolons and flowery sentences that seemed to go on for pages. I loved it. It had the flavor of old New York. I read it two times in the first week. I began to hear the clip-clop of horses out my window, the clack of streetcars, the tinkle of the bell and the treble of the conductor’s call. I fully expected to get up at some point and look out the window and discover I was living in 1910.

  I didn’t see Catherine at all that week. She said she was busy with the history conference, but I wasn’t so sure. She asked about classes and I said they were the same. I said I had been spending some time at the library, reading old newspapers and looking for a review of The Intrepid Ones. She seemed to believe it, but probably wondered why she hadn’t run into me. If she thought I was lying, she didn’t say.

  That week away from Catherine, I started doing a funny thing. Something I’m embarrassed to admit. But I’ve admitted the stolen scrapbook, so what could be worse? At night, I started propping a picture of Lucy and Harriet on the nightstand beside my bed. I tried putting a picture of the whole Gang there, but that was too discomforting, like a crowd of people was watching me sleep. So I substituted the picture of Lucy and Harriet. While Lucy watched, Harriet sang me to sleep with “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” She had a lovely voice.

  “I’m an actress, my dear,” she told me when I complimented her. “My voice is my living.”

  Lucy whistled softly as Harriet sang. I fell asleep soundly, deeply, pleasantly, with the sensation that someone was fondling my breasts.

  • • •

  Friday evening Catherine surprised me at the door with a carton of mu shu vegetables and another of curry chicken.

  “My favorites,” I smiled.

  “I missed you,” she said, folding her arms and the cartons around me. “Why am I always the one who has to make up?”

  I couldn’t answer, because she was kissing me hard, deep, with an insistence that made my knees buckle. When she released me, she said decisively, “I think we should live together. After all, your rent’s going up. It’s the perfect time.”

  “For you to move in here?” I asked hopefully.

  “God, no. I’d be stupid to move out of a rent-controlled apartment,” she said, laying out the food on the coffee table with rice bowls and chopsticks. “If you moved in with me, it would be so cheap. One-forty-five a month for each of us.” She must have expected the hesitant look on my face. I was still standing at the door. She left the food and came toward me in a hot rush. Her mouth was on mine again, her tongue darting in and out with silky speed.

  She had my pants unbuttoned before I knew what was happening. She pushed them down to my knees adeptly with one hand and gripped my waist with the other. In one quick, sure movement she was inside me, with two, three fingers, maybe more. I
groaned with the sudden sweet memory of what sex with Catherine was like. I had almost forgotten, in one short week.

  She pushed into me harder as she knelt down and took me with her tongue, the hard, confident tongue I knew so well. It didn’t take long. As I came, I grabbed her head and pushed it firmly against me. She was still holding my waist so I wouldn’t fall over. There was a sweet, sharp pain between my legs as her fingers slipped out. She wiped her mouth delicately on my bush, as she would later on her napkin, after we ate.

  “That’ll give you something to think about,” she said, rebuttoning my pants. Then she served dinner. It was still piping hot.

  • • •

  I woke up in the middle of the night with the same sensation as before, of someone touching my breasts. Catherine was sound asleep on her side, facing the wall. The picture of Lucy and Harriet, which I had hurriedly flipped over so Catherine wouldn’t see it, was standing upright on the nightstand. They were watching us, with the faintly amused and intrigued smiles of voyeurs.

  Then in my dreams I thought I saw Lucy and Harriet having sex. Two figures were tucked away under an enormous quilt in a massive rosewood sleigh bed that dwarfed both of them. Every now and then I spied a bare arm or leg or buttock and heard a satisfied moan. In the morning, the picture of them was face down again, exactly the way I had left it.

  5

  I calculated how far my savings would take me. Then I took a part-time job at an antiques and junk shop called Out of Time, on upper Broadway not far from my apartment.

  The shop bore no resemblance to the one where I had found the scrapbook. There was more junk than antiques. Baskets and barrels heaped with old clutter lined the floor. The furniture was stacked one piece on top of another. The books filled empty liquor store boxes. There was a table of broken stuff outside with a hastily scrawled sign that said, “Your pick—25¢.”

  The shop was owned by a woman who I thought may have been a lesbian. She didn’t look like one, but she looked at women as if she were. She wore huge, brightly colored caftans with strands of love beads around her neck. Time had stopped for her somewhere around 1968. Her name was Marjorie, but everyone called her Margielove. She had a streak of bright blond running across the right side of her long black hair, and she touched my arm lightly with fingers covered in costume jewelry rings.

  She had hired me on the spot. I saw the sign in the window for part-time help and I wandered in, pretending to shop for mismatched silver. I took to the register two F.B. Rogers soup spoons and a knife.

  “It’s four for a dollar,” she said, and I went back and fished another spoon out of the silverware basket.

  “You must eat a lot of soup,” she chuckled, eyeing me in a cool, possessive way.

  “I collect spoons,” I lied then added quickly, “and an occasional knife.”

  “One-oh-eight,” she said, her bedecked fingers drumming the glass of the counter. She put the silver into a crinkled, ratty-looking paper bag that said Duane Reade Drugs on the front.

  I paid and stood thumbing through a shoebox of postcards on the counter. I picked out one, a hand-tinted photo of a bunch of roses, and another, a view of the Public Library in 1926.

  “And these,” I said.

  “You collect postcards, too,” she snickered. “And what else?”

  “That’s all today,” I said.

  “No, I mean what else do you collect?” she persisted.

  I hesitated and watched her fingers tapping the countertop. I wanted to reach over and stop them, but gently.

  “Photographs from the 1920s,” I said. “And books.” I watched her eyes watch me. There was kindness somewhere behind them. “Lesbian books,” I ventured.

  “Well,” she said, sucking in a deep breath, “we don’t get too many of those. Of course, no one’s ever straightened out the mess here to see what we really have. I just bought this joint six months ago. I’d like to clean it up some.”

  I put down another $2.16 for the postcards, thinking it was an unusual pricing system that valued paper higher than sterling silver.

  “I need a job,” I said suddenly, surprising myself more than her.

  “Can you start tomorrow?” she asked. As it turned out, I could. I had nothing else to do, but sit and wait to hear from Lucy.

  • • •

  It was an ideal job for me at that time. I got to wear jeans and t-shirts and rummage through someone else’s mess. Margielove let me start with the books. Besides the boxes in the store, a quarter of the cellar was stacked with decaying books.

  Since I was only getting six dollars an hour, Margielove cut me a deal. “Anything you find that you want, take it,” she said, adding, “within reason.” The most appealing thing about Margielove was she trusted me without knowing me. Something in my face, she said. She would have been surprised to hear about my theft of the scrapbook. Or maybe not. She was the kind of woman who looked like she had seen everything at least once, and maybe two or three times.

  There were old bookshelves in the basement covered with dusty, broken curios. Over the first few weeks, I emptied the junk into boxes, then cleaned and refinished the shelves. Margielove paid two neighborhood boys to carry them from the basement to the shop, where it was hard to tell if they added anything or not.

  “It’s a start,” she said.

  Then I went to work on the books in the shop. A lot of them were worthless from mildew. We placed them on the twenty-five cents table outside. Most of the others were second and third printings of old novels I had never heard of that people would probably never buy. We kept them inside and charged fifty cents apiece for them.

  “At least they look good,” Margielove said.

  The books in the basement were mostly a disappointment. They were severely water-damaged from a thin leak from some unknown source. We ended up putting most of them on the sidewalk for the street people. They disappeared one by one, which pleased Margielove.

  “It’s a service to the community,” she observed.

  After two weeks, when I had given up discovering anything I wanted, I made an incredible find. The binding was completely ripped off, but I could still read the title page, An Economic History of American Women by Sarah Stern, published in 1920. I had almost forgotten her. She had barely looked at me from the scrapbook, she had hardly said a word. The inscription was smudged and dirty, but indelible. It read, “For my partners in crime, Love, Sarah.” Stuck between two pages in the middle of the book was a yellowed newspaper clipping from a Saratoga Springs newspaper. Someone had marked at the top in blue ink, “June 24, 1919. Harriet a star. Yippee!” The clipping was a review of a play called Miss Morley. Part of it was circled with the same blue pen.

  Miss Harriet Timberlake of 223 W. 85 St. in New York City made a stunning debut last night in the title role of Christina Morley. Her flawless delivery stands her with the great comic actresses of our time. It is a credit to her talent that she gave a memorable performance in an otherwise less than memorable play. This reviewer hopes to see more of her soon, in a vehicle that would match her considerable gifts.

  Now I had proof for Catherine. The writing on the clipping matched the inscription in Lucy’s book.

  • • •

  I began to suspect that Catherine was suspicious. I had even gone to her apartment one evening to allay apprehensions. She seemed to be asking “How’s summer term?” or “Is the campus pretty quiet?” more often than she should have. And I was running out of things to say and stories to tell. I had started recalling incidents from my college days as if they had happened yesterday in class. When Catherine came over, I would pretend I had work of my own to do and would excuse myself for an hour to do it. She wasn’t very curious about it—she had found, in the past, my discussions of minute points of American literary criticism extremely dull.

  But she did want to know about Lucy.

  “And how’s your favorite research topic coming along?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “you�
�re not going to believe this, but I found a book by Sarah Stern.”

  Of course, she asked, “Where?”

  I thought quickly and decided the antiques shop where I got the scrapbook was the best bet. I could milk it for a while, as long as Catherine didn’t want to know exactly where it was.

  “At the shop again, the antiques shop. I gave the shopkeeper my number, so she’s on the lookout for stuff. This is the most amazing find.” I ran into the bedroom to get it for her. From their place on the nightstand Lucy and Harriet looked out at me blankly, with no emotion or sign of life. I flipped them onto their faces.

  Catherine read the clipping with great interest. Then she held it next to the inscription in The Intrepid Ones. “Yep, it’s the same hand,” she said. “I guess you’re assuming it’s Lucy’s.”

  I know it’s Lucy’s, I wanted to scream. I was tiring of the conscientious historian who would never believe anything without a small library of corroborating material. “Yes,” I said.

  “It still doesn’t have her name anywhere,” Catherine said doubtfully. “It’s probably a safe assumption, but you need to find some letters, a diary. Any luck so far?” She was twisting her hair with ideas.

  “No,” I said.

  “So when did she die?” Catherine asked suddenly. “What were her dates?”

  I looked at her quizzically, as if she had just turned into Dr. Hammill, my college history professor, right before my eyes. In fact, I thought I heard her voice lower a pitch and saw some black hairs sprout on her upper lip. I turned away quickly, afraid that when I glanced back she would be smoking a pipe.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, foolishly I realized. “Does it matter?” It was hard for me to think of Lucy as having “dates,” someone who was and then was no more. Under the circumstances, it seemed preposterous.

  “Does it matter!” she repeated. “Oh, now I see what the problem is! I encourage you to do historical research, but you don’t have the slightest idea how to go about it!” She smiled at my historical innocence. “I’ll tell you what. The conference is this weekend, and after it’s over I’ll have more time. Why don’t I call the Lesbian Archives and make an appointment for us? They must have something about these women, Lucy and Sarah at the very least.”