Out of Time Read online

  My friend, Rachel Mikulsky, was barely recognizable. Like so many others, her dress had caught fire and had burned her badly. Her face was smashed from the fall to the sidewalk. This, I maintain, is nothing short of murder.

  Catherine was quiet for a few moments. “This is great stuff,” she finally said.

  I knew what she meant. It was great for her, since she’d done so much research on immigrant women on the Lower East Side. But I wasn’t quite sure what it told me.

  “Do you mind if I do a little digging into Sarah Stern?” Catherine asked finally. “I didn’t realize how interesting your Gang really is!”

  I said I didn’t mind, but that was just one more lie. I had the craziest feeling that Catherine was going to ruin everything.

  • • •

  Maybe Catherine thought getting more involved would be helpful to me. Or maybe it was that she found something about The Gang that she could really hang on to. Or that it would be something for us to share. Whatever her rationale, and heedless of the fact that I didn’t show a lot of interest, Catherine started bringing me things about Sarah Stem. How she found them is a mystery to me. I have never really understood how historians just seem to know where to find information.

  “She was really prolific!” Catherine said, as she pulled out a manila envelope of xeroxed articles. “I haven’t found anything earlier than that Triangle article, but after that, I guess she got political.”

  We were eating dinner at Catherine’s, some unnamed dish she’d thrown together from various leftover takeout cartons. Whatever I had was a bizarre mixture of beef with broccoli and chicken in garlic sauce. I munched in silence.

  “I’m really glad we talked to Roz, aren’t you?” Catherine asked, poking a chopstick at the air for emphasis.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  Catherine looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m not sure what all this stuff about the Triangle fire and labor organizing has to do with anything,” I said.

  “But this is the most interesting stuff!” she said, in surprise. I guess she was used to my agreeing with her. “I mean, look what a contribution this little-known woman was making. This makes those women come alive, almost like they’re right here with us.” She paused. “Don’t you think?”

  I looked around but saw no traces of Lucy or any of them, even Sarah. They had never felt deader to me than when reduced to some xeroxed articles.

  “Listen to this,” Catherine said eagerly, through a mouthful of something. “This is from Sarah’s article about a mass feminist meeting at Cooper Union in 1914:

  The spirit of fraternity and sorority filled the hail, and a cry went up from the crowd as Marie Jenny Howe stated the feminist agenda: “We’re sick of being specialized to sex. We intend to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole, big, human selves.”

  I mean, can’t you just see it all? Doesn’t it make you want to be there?”

  It did sound inspiring, but something in me remained unmoved. It occurred to me that all these things had to do with the public, not the private, Sarah. What was she like at home, with Elinor? Where did she and Lucy have dinner? What did they talk about when they were just being friends, just being The Gang, and not vociferous feminists?

  This was not how I wanted to get to know the women in the photographs. The ones who winked at me and sent me postcards. Catherine was cluttering things up.

  I got up abruptly, as she was reading another article, this one about another garment factory strike, and picked up my knapsack.

  “Hey,” Catherine said, as I headed toward the door, “where are you going?”

  “Home,” I said, sadly. And in my mind I added, “To Lucy and Harriet.”

  7

  I signed the lease for my apartment and asked Margielove if I could work full-time.

  “I thought you were doing research and needed a flexible schedule.”

  “I need the money more,” I said, and she looked into my eyes and saw, I guess, that she could believe me. I might stretch the truth about my hobbies and collections, but my nervousness about money must have shown through clearly.

  “I see,” she said.

  She didn’t have enough work for me full-time, so she gave me thirty hours a week and invited me to start collecting more things from the shop. That was how I began my collection of antiques from the 1920s. I figured that if I ever got too desperate, I could sell them on Broadway or at a flea market to pick up some cash. It was a nice assortment of pressed glass, mechanical toys, magazines, china, women’s costume accessories, and some odd bits of furniture. Oh, and always, of course, books and photographs.

  My apartment, which was small to begin with, began to take on the cluttered look of a rotting old historical society. “How can you afford this stuff?” Catherine asked me. We were seeing less of each other, and each time she came over, I had two or three new things.

  “The woman at Out of Time gives me a good deal,” I said, somewhat truthfully.

  After that night at her apartment, Catherine stopped asking me about my research. If she was doing any more of her own, which I doubt, she didn’t mention it. In fact, she stopped asking me about most things. She was really angry at me and had to keep herself from exploding several times. Part of me wanted to explain. Twice I almost told her I had quit Columbia, but I stopped short at the crucial moment. “Catherine, there’s something I want to tell you. I’ve quit—” and the look of worry in her eyes made me hesitate. So I had to cut down on two of my minor vices, just so I wouldn’t have to lie to her again.

  “—drinking,” I finished once, and she was very puzzled by the confession.

  “You hardly drink at all,” she said.

  “And I don’t like how I feel when I do,” I insisted. “I’m going to try stopping for a while.”

  The second time, I finished with “—drinking so much coffee.” I knew that would please Catherine, who drank nothing stronger than an occasional cup of Morning Thunder.

  “That should help make you more relaxed,” she observed, but the slight tilt of her chin and the slant of her left eyebrow made me think she knew I was bluffing.

  I don’t know why I alienated Catherine. It was as if I did it on purpose, to push her further and further away and to build a solid wall of lies between us. We’d been together three years, and sometimes it was hard to figure out why. She was brilliant and thoughtful, and I made her laugh. She said insightful things, and I listened well. She made suggestions, and I took them. Every now and then, I wondered where I had gone in the relationship. I depended so much on what Catherine thought of me. Now she was forging into my territory, taking over almost, and in a way I didn’t like. Her fascination with precise facts and dates left no room for intuition or imagination. Or romance.

  We had a big blowup after that evening at her place. She was furious with me, and said she was only trying to help. I repeated that the kind of help she had to offer wasn’t really what I needed.

  “Well, what do you need?” she said, hurt.

  Embarrassed, I had to admit I didn’t really know, what I needed in general, or from her. I loved her, but I was beginning to love more the quick and unexpected sound of Harriet’s laugh, the reassuring calm of Lucy’s voice. “Trust yourself,” Lucy had told me, and ultimately I did just that. It was the best advice I’d had in a while. I trusted that something special was happening to me, and that I was not just going crazy.

  • • •

  I woke up one morning with the touch of soft, warm lips on mine. At first, I didn’t know they were lips. I thought maybe a butterfly had fluttered against my cheeks and landed on my mouth. I reached up dreamily to brush it off, and realized it was a kiss instead.

  “That’s what a kiss was like in 1926,” someone said, and the honeyed tone told me that it was Harriet.

  • • •

  Out of Time was beginning to take on a new look. After weeks of arranging the books an
d postcards, I took on the harder task of everything else, the mountains of stuff piled in the middle of the room and overflowing out to the edges. Broken furniture and china we put out onto the street as part of our community service project. One day as I walked up Broadway, I saw a street vendor using one of our chairs. He had improvised a broken broom handle for the fourth leg. Another day I saw one of our battered end tables and broken dishes being used by a homeless woman to eat her lunch, the remainders of someone’s Big Mac and Filet o’ Fish. The project, I reported to Margielove, was working well.

  We were becoming good friends. She tolerated me in a way others never had, not even Catherine. Catherine, I sometimes thought, loved me for what I might become. But Margielove had a true affection for me as I was.

  “Van Dine,” she would say when I showed up for work. She started to call me by my last name as we became more familiar. “Look at the great piece of junk I found for you.” She saved all the twenties stuff for me and gave me first dibs on all of it. People would come into the store looking for items from the twenties, cookware or glasses or jewelry, and she steered them away. “No twenties stuff here,” she scowled. “I can’t stand the hullabaloo around the twenties.” The customers looked confused until she pointed them down Broadway, to another shop. “They have better stuff,” she said.

  She was not much of a businesswoman, and she did not really like antiques that much. The reason the place got straightened up in just a little over a month was that she never bought any new merchandise. We simply kept selling off, slowly, what she acquired when she bought the store. After I cleaned out the center of the store, we brought things up from the basement. Soon there was nothing down there but some rusty metal shelves. I wondered what we’d do when we sold everything. I asked her.

  “Go to Bermuda?” she suggested.

  As the summer wore on, there was less and less to straighten up, and I convinced Margielove that it was good business to purchase more inventory. As long as she didn’t have to do it, she didn’t care. She paid me to comb the classifieds for estate sales and flea markets. But the items were already marked up so high, we would have had to inflate the prices beyond reason to make a profit.

  “You have to go out of New York,” I said, frustrated. “It’s like the rents, everything’s too outrageously overpriced here.”

  “Why don’t you then?” she said casually.

  “Why don’t I then what?” I asked.

  “Go out of New York.” She was eating a salt bagel oozing with cream cheese.

  I shook my head. “I’d need a car,” I said, “and cash.”

  “We have both,” she said, explaining that she had an old station wagon parked in New Jersey that she never used because it was too tight for her behind the wheel. The store’s account was doing well; we had sold a lot by making the store more presentable. But we would have a problem soon if she didn’t either sell the store or get more merchandise.

  “I don’t care which way we go,” she said, making it my decision. I had gone, in a short time, from part-time employee to management consultant. “What do you think?”

  I needed the job. I wanted the job. And I seemed to have nothing holding me in New York, now that Catherine and I were on the rocks.

  “I could go upstate,” I said with a glimmer in my eye. “To Saratoga and Glens Falls.”

  “Whatever,” she said, licking the cream cheese from her thumb.

  • • •

  When I told Catherine I needed to get away before fall term, she sounded almost relieved. We had been bickering a lot. When I said I was going upstate to do some research, she really perked up, probably hoping I was finally getting my act together.

  “That’s terrific,” she said. I could see her smiling even over the phone. “I’m so glad you’re following through on this.” There was a fumble of hesitation from her end. “Can I—can I see you before you go?” she asked. “Maybe I could make dinner.”

  I knew what Catherine’s dinners were. They were my favorite meals, lovingly prepared, usually from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook. They were invariably served by candlelight, with some flowers and an appropriate wine. They were often eaten in the nude, after an hour or two of sex. They didn’t happen that frequently, but when they did they managed to cement our relationship, at least temporarily, until the memory had worn off. They were usually followed by more sex, elaborate and carried on till early morning.

  “Of course,” I said, the anticipation both painful and pleasurable at the same time. “I’d like that.”

  • • •

  The morning I left to drive upstate, Catherine turned toward me in bed and took my face in her hands.

  “Look,” she said, and I had no choice but to stare into the infinity of those green eyes, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and you obviously don’t want me to know. I don’t know what’s going on with us either.”

  I started to answer, to say something vaguely reassuring, but she pushed both her thumbs lightly across my lips.

  “But if last night is any indication of what we feel for each other, I think we have something worth working out.” She moved her thumbs and kissed me straight on. Our eyes locked. “Come back to me,” she demanded simply.

  She rolled on top of me then and took one of my breasts firmly in her mouth. The rest, shall we say, is history.

  8

  In the end, I was gone less than a week, but it felt like much longer. I followed the Hudson River and stayed away, as much as possible, from the interstates. I wanted the opportunity to stop whenever I saw a yard sale or a junk store.

  I have never known much about antiques. I was not the best choice to send on a buying trip. Within the first day, I filled a few boxes with Depression glass and imitation Fiestaware. One good find just north of Kingston was a porch sale full of pressed back chairs, most in good condition, just needing some refinishing. I bought the lot of them and sandwiched them tightly into the back of the station wagon.

  In New York, by this time in my shopping, the car would have been sliced open to get whatever potentially valuable stuff was inside. Upstate, I sometimes left the car unlocked. The further north I got, the more relaxed I felt, like New York City was just a bad memory.

  The most valuable things I brought along were pictures of The Gang. I couldn’t see traveling without them, not to the area where Lucy was born and Harriet had her first dramatic success. The closer I came to Saratoga Springs, the stronger I felt their presence. In fact, I thought someone said, “Oh, look!” a few times on the road outside of town, but I didn’t recognize the voice.

  I had never been to Saratoga Springs, and it struck me as a little jewel of the North Country. I knew immediately I wanted to stay at The Saratoga House, which had not changed appreciably in one hundred years. It was not in my budget; camping and cheap bed and breakfasts were. But it sat so invitingly on Broadway at the beginning of a line of perfectly preserved old buildings, I was pulling out my credit card before I realized what I was doing.

  “It’s worth the expense,” someone behind me whispered in a familiar voice. I turned quickly, expecting to see Harriet, but a middle-aged couple in tourists’ clothes stood behind me.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I said, it’s worth the expense,” the woman repeated, in a different accent altogether, a New England twang. “We’ve stayed here twice before. You’ll love it.”

  I don’t know how she knew I was concerned about money, but I vaguely remember echoing the price of a single room twice after the concierge told me.

  All the way up to the room, I kept thinking how foolish I was, spending money I didn’t have and would be paying back for months. I kept thinking, I should be on my way to do my job, further north, where the bargains would be even better. I kept thinking, don’t do this, don’t turn the key in the lock, don’t establish yourself in the oak bed, don’t linger at the window pretending you’re in another time. But then I was there already, and there didn’
t seem to be much sense in turning back.

  • • •

  The bed was smaller than average, a three-quarter size not quite big enough for two but more than adequate for one. The headboard and footboard were elaborately carved with rows of beading and flowers. There were a simple oak dresser and wash stand to match. I had seen drawings of similar bedroom suites in an old Sears Roebuck catalog Margielove had at the store to help date our kitchen utensils. In 1912, the set had cost about forty dollars.

  Now I was lying in the bed, thinking about all the people who had had sex there, conceived children there, maybe even died there. For all I knew, this could have been the very room Lucy and Harriet had had in Saratoga when Harriet had her success in Miss Morley, the very bed in which they celebrated her new career. Before I dozed off, I thought about the dream I had in which Lucy and Harriet were making love in a rosewood bed, and it lulled me happily to sleep.

  I woke with a start, probably from some noise out in the street, and tried to keep my heavy eyelids open. A deep shaft of afternoon sun cut across the floor like a spotlight. The slant of it was disorienting. In the pool of light it left at the foot of the bed stood Harriet.

  “Actually, it’s two flights down,” she said.

  “What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and propping myself up on my elbows.

  “Our room,” she answered simply, as if I should have known, as if I had just asked a question and she was politely responding. “When we stay here, we always stay in the third-floor corner room that looks up Broadway. That way,” she laughed, her high, fruity laugh, “I can say I’ve made it to Broadway.”

  “Did you ever?” I ventured carefully, as she watched me from behind long, lazy lashes.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said, laughing again. This time the laugh had a little catch in it, like a hiccup. “But we don’t need to talk about that now.” Her voice became lower, softer, more alluring. “Lucy’s asleep.”

  In the moment before she came to me on the bed, when she was undoing the pearly buttons of her blouse and dropping her skirt to the floor, something occurred to me that hadn’t before. I said it aloud.