Out of Time Read online

  “Not really,” she answered, “but she’s faithful to me.”

  She left on her cream silk teddy. She looked different close up, prettier, but less fragile. Her mouth tasted like melted chocolate and brandy. Her skin smelled like fresh cut roses. Her heart pounded just like mine. Her hands on my breasts were familiar. In between kisses I managed to say, “But Lucy. And Catherine.” Harriet swallowed the words right out of my mouth.

  “It’s for your education,” she purred, her tongue exploring the curves of my ear. “Tell yourself it’s for history.”

  • • •

  When I woke up, the air in the room was cold. I was shivering under the bed covers, fully clothed, even in my shoes. The window was open, the sun was just going down. My left shoulder ached, my back was stiff, and my mouth tasted like stale liquor. I tried to recall if I’d been drinking, then I remembered that I’d given up what little I drank weeks before. I decided I should start again.

  I had locked the door from the inside and it was still locked. I tugged at it two or three times to reassure myself. Everything in the room looked the same, but different, too. In the shadows of sunset the wood was darker, richer, the wallpaper had more flowers in it, the ceiling was just a little bit lower. I rifled through my bag for the handful of pictures I’d brought with me. I wanted to see if there was anything different about Harriet’s smile.

  But they were gone. I knew it in the instant I unzipped the bag. I pulled everything out of it twice. I checked in pockets, underwear, in every page of the book I was reading. I combed the floor on my hands and knees. I inspected every drawer, every crevice of the armchair. I even unmade the bed and flipped over the mattress. Then I picked up the phone to call the front desk.

  “There’s been a theft,” I planned to say, “of some valuable photographs. From my room as I slept. I left the window open. Nothing else seems to be missing.”

  But when the concierge answered, I merely asked, “How late is the dining room open?”

  Then I took a shower and changed my clothes, scolding myself for being so naive, so trustworthy. I had no reason to believe that a flapper from the 1920s wouldn’t do me wrong.

  “But Harriet,” I said incredulously. Then her face came back to me from the photos, the teasing slant of her hat, the suggestive tilt of her eyebrow, the knowing part of her lips.

  “Especially Harriet,” I decided. Suddenly it all seemed like a game: the clues, the appearances, the hints and suggestions, and finally the theft, or borrowing, of the pictures. It was a game, I realized, that could go on forever. I could play, as I had been, or not. I could force them to tell me their story; I could try to learn the story myself. Who was to say, anyway, that they would tell me correctly, especially Harriet, who was false to me and Lucy? I repacked my bag and carried it down to the front desk.

  The concierge was surprised that I was checking out at seven p.m., not having spent the night.

  “I needed a nap,” I said, “and to freshen up.” It was something you might do at a fifteen-dollar-a-night motel, but not what this hotel was accustomed to.

  “Tell me,” I said, as he was accepting my keys, “the room at the corner on the third floor, facing up Broadway?”

  “Facing north? Yes?” He looked at me skeptically, as if he would not have been surprised if I wanted to check back in.

  “Is anyone in that room now?”

  He perused his records. “No,” he said.

  “Do you suppose I could see it?” I asked, signing the final bill. “My parents stayed there on their honeymoon. It has, you know, memories.”

  “Well,” he said, “that would be highly unusual.” He bit his bottom lip. He was not cold, just cautious.

  He had a bellhop take me to the room. The boy hardly said a word. He barely looked at me. He must have thought, here’s another crazy tourist. Or else he had sized me up and was anticipating no tip.

  The room was larger than mine had been, almost a suite, with two of everything—two windows, two chairs, two dressers, two nightstands. The wallpaper was rose with two thin alternating stripes of white and deep green. The lithographs on the wall, all of old Saratoga, were hung in two’s. There were two green cotton area rugs on the hardwood floor.

  Between the twin nightstands stood a huge rosewood sleigh bed, the bed in my dreams.

  “Has that always been here?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” the boy said. “Since I’ve been here.”

  “How long is that?”

  “Since last Christmas.” He started to shift impatiently from one foot to the other. “The manager would know, I guess.”

  I took two one-dollar bills out of my wallet, folded them up, and handed them to him. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I took one final look around the room while he uncrinkled the bills. I walked to the window and stared up Broadway, I touched the windowsill just as others had, hundreds of times before. I pressed my nose to the cool glass, then wiped the smudge it left there with my sleeve.

  “I have to get back to work now, ma’am,” he reminded me.

  “Of course,” I said, fingering the wallpaper lightly on my way out. At the full-length mirror near the door, I stopped to inspect the worn marks in the floorboards, contemplating the shuffling of feet over time as people on their way out to dinner, the theater, the racetrack, took one last assessment of their looks. I looked tired.

  The mirror caught the corner of the bed, where Harriet sat. I turned to her to ask where my pictures were, just as the bellhop flipped off the light.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I thought you were done.” When the light clicked on again, Harriet was gone.

  “I am,” I said, closing the door behind me.

  • • •

  By that time it was too dark to pitch a camp, so I drove back to one of the cheap tourist motels I passed on my way into town. There I had what they called a cabin, which was really nothing more than a double bed surrounded by four walls. One of the four walls was shared with another half of the cabin. I was kept awake most of the night by moans and crashing bedsprings on the other side of that wall. The rest of the night, I tossed and tumbled on a mattress that had seen better days. No matter where I started out, I ended up rolling to the middle.

  In the morning, when I got into my car, things inside looked different, but just slightly so, like the time my apartment was robbed by a considerate burglar who closed all the drawers and locked the door on his way out. It took a while to figure out something was wrong. In the back of the car, I did a quick visual inventory and everything seemed to be in place. Then I sniffed roses in the air.

  On the floor of the front passenger seat was the packet of photos, as if they’d been hiding there all along. They were all there, but with one more added, one I hadn’t seen before. It was a picture of Harriet, sitting in a chair in the suite I’d just visited, surrounded by roses. She held a handmade sign in front of her that read “Harriet on Broadway.” As always, her eyebrow was cocked, and her lips curled deliciously into a smile.

  • • •

  On the road to Glens Falls, I remembered why I was making this trip and stopped several times at run-down antiques and thrift stores. I picked up some old dime novels and a couple of printer’s type trays for next to nothing. At a yard sale just south of Glens Falls, I found a collection of nice old wooden planes that had belonged to the owner’s grandfather.

  “What will you do with them?” he asked, following me to the car, where I had already tucked the box of planes out of sight.

  “Display them,” I said. It was only a lie of omission. I knew he wouldn’t have sold them so readily to a dealer.

  “Oh,” he said, hovering near me, obviously unsure if he’d done the right thing. I was overcome by the memory of the antiques store downtown, the rain, the scrapbook, the guilt, the ethics of it all.

  “Look,” I said before I closed the back door, “if you’d like to change your mind, I’d understand. I mean, you can have them back.”

  �
��I was going to give them to the museum, y’know, but they couldn’t pay me,” he said distractedly. “My wife and me, we’re moving to Florida and we can’t take so much with us. And we need the cash.” He held out his hand, and I shook it. “No,” he smiled, “a deal’s a deal.”

  “What was your grandfather’s name?” I asked, writing it on the side of the box as he told me. “And his dates?” The word “dates” caught on my tongue. My lips tried to keep it in, but it snuck out anyway. With it came an overwhelming loneliness for Catherine.

  “Born and raised not two miles from here,” the man said.

  “Well, I thank you for sharing this part of your history,” I said with a full, off-white smile, the one I reserve for my best days.

  He gave me a half-salute as I drove away. I had already decided to give the planes to the museum in Glens Falls. In some small way, I had to atone for the scrapbook.

  9

  Letty King lived in a rambling white house not unlike all the others in Glens Falls. The town was immaculately middle-class. From what I could see, there was no bad part of town, no wrong side of the tracks. What seemed to be the slightly poorer neighborhood was still pristine, just a little more crowded. The town looked like a set for a Thornton Wilder play. It made me suddenly homesick for the diversity and dishevelment of Manhattan.

  It’s hard to believe I went there uninvited, unannounced, and harder to believe that Letty King didn’t keep me on the other side of the screen door. She did not at all appreciate the mention of her aunt’s name.

  “My aunt Lucy!” she shrilled. “My aunt Lucy! What’s all this sudden fascination with my aunt Lucy! First, a call from that archivist from New York City, now you. You’d think she was famous or something!”

  I explained, or at least gave my white-washed version, of how I happened on the scrapbook. I pulled out the photos for her to see.

  She shrieked when she saw them, and held a hand dramatically to her chest. She pushed the screen door open and waved me inside. “Let me see those,” she demanded. She flipped through them hurriedly, wildly almost, ending up with the most recently acquired one of Harriet. “How did you get these?”

  I had just told her, but Roz had warned me about her memory lapses. I repeated my story.

  “Bea must have taken them,” she mumbled.

  “Excuse me?” I said. She wandered out of the foyer into the living room, probably furnished in the same way it had been for sixty years.

  “Bea, my sister,” she said, lowering herself heavily onto the camelback sofa. She didn’t offer me a chair but I took one anyway, a small, narrow rocker with a caned seat.

  “These pictures,” she said, wiping a few beads of sweat from her nose, “belong to me.”

  I could not, in all honesty, protest and say, “Oh, no, I bought them fair and square.” They felt like mine, but I knew all too well how I’d acquired them.

  “How did you get them again?” and I related the story calmly, even though my stomach was churning.

  “My sister Bea stole them from me,” she said, angrily. “She must have come here and took them right out of the attic.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked, as gently as I could.

  “Because I wouldn’t give them to her,” she snapped. “She wanted the letters, too, and the diaries. She’s afraid I’ll burn them someday, like Mother wanted to. And maybe I will. But Aunt Lucy left them with Mother, and Mother left everything in this house to me. I can do what I like with them.”

  “They’re so valuable, though,” I said. Then, when her eyes brightened, I added quickly, “Historically speaking, that is.”

  She looked at me skeptically over her glasses. “You think so?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “There’s a great demand to know what women’s lives were like back then.”

  She snorted, “Well, she was hardly your typical woman. Maybe you don’t know that.”

  “I know she was a lesbian,” I said coolly. I thought I saw her shiver or maybe she just shifted in her seat.

  “Yes, well,” she said, obviously agitated.

  “Of course, I’ll give you back the pictures if you want,” I gambled.

  “Well, you bought them,” she said, frowning. “If I’d known they were worth something, I’d have sold them myself.” She took off her glasses and wiped the sweat off the bridge of her nose. “What will you do with them?”

  “I’d just like to look at them, study them,” I said truthfully. “But I’d also like to find out more about all the women in them, which is why I’m here.”

  She handed the photos across to me. “And what would you give me for the rest?” she asked.

  My heart was somewhere out of my chest, somewhere up past my throat, in my ears, beating till I couldn’t hear myself talk. “The rest?” I asked meekly.

  “The letters and other junk,” she said. She pulled out a flowered cotton handkerchief and wiped her whole face several times. “There’s a big box of it upstairs.”

  I couldn’t think quickly enough. “Oh, it’s so hard to put a price tag on history,” I said. “Maybe a hundred dollars?”

  She laughed out loud and pushed herself up from the sofa. “You just said it was valuable. That’s what you call valuable?” She started to walk out into the foyer, and I watched her go while I clutched the photos. At the doorway, she glanced back over her shoulder at me. “Well, come on then,” she said impatiently. “Don’t you want to see it?”

  I scrambled up from the little chair with difficulty, almost tipping it over frontwards as I did. She led me up two flights to a door that hid a steeper, more narrow staircase, bathed in light from dormer windows. The third floor of the house was set up as a small apartment. The ceilings were lower than downstairs, and there were numerous charming eaves. There was an efficiency kitchen, a bedroom with a large iron bed, and a bright living room with wicker furniture. The bathroom was reigned by a footed bathtub, which the whole Gang probably would have fit into comfortably.

  “Who lives here?” I asked, imagining myself entertaining company in the huge bathtub.

  “No one now,” she said. “Aunt Lucy did briefly, when I was a girl. She had a bit of a breakdown and stayed here for a few months. When I got older, before I married King, Mother let me move up here. Then, later, Mother turned the rest of the house over to me and King, and she made the third floor home. That’s when we put in the efficiency kitchen.”

  “Lucy had a breakdown?” I asked, my heartbeats drowning out my voice again. “I can’t believe it.”

  Letty looked suddenly skeptical, her memory clearly not all it once was. “Yes, yes, I think so,” she hesitated. “At least I thought so.”

  “Then I’m sure she did,” I added, reassuringly.

  “When what’s-her-name died,” she muttered. “That friend of hers. The little flirt, what was her name again?”

  For me, the air had gotten thicker at the word “died.” The sun had become unbearably bright. It reflected off the windows in blinding strokes. It made me suddenly too tired to stand.

  “Harriet,” I said, wearily.

  “Yes, that’s it,” she agreed.

  She was already pulling a big box out of the closet on the landing. The cardboard looked like it would give way under her tugging, but I didn’t offer to help. I had dropped into one of the kitchen chairs.

  “This is it,” she said. “Letters, some diaries, some mementos, the manuscripts of some stories she wrote. Mother wanted to get rid of it years ago, but Bea stopped her. This is worth more than, what did you say? Two hundred dollars?”

  I nodded and reached over into the box. Bunches of letters tied up with ribbon. Some Moroccan leather notebooks, well worn. Large brown packages neatly wrapped. All precisely packed away. For history.

  “Who did this?” I asked. “Who organized the box?”

  She looked puzzled. “Why, Aunt Lucy, I guess,” she said. “Mother wouldn’t have bothered. Don’t you want to inspect the stuff? After all, three hundred is
a lot of money for a bunch of paper. You did say three hundred?”

  I nodded again.

  “Actually, I bet it’s worth three thousand,” she said. “I bet some museum would give me three thousand dollars.”

  I stood up, my knees weak. It was very hot and stuffy in the attic. “I have to go now,” I said. “I’m sorry to have taken your time. I don’t have three thousand dollars. I was just hoping you’d let me read the stuff. Just for curiosity’s sake.”

  I started down the stairs, where I could feel the cool air circulating from the second floor. I breathed it in deeply and felt instantly clearer headed.

  “Wait a minute,” she called after me. “Can you come back tomorrow? Tomorrow at one.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Just come back,” she said, and not knowing why but having nothing to lose, I did.

  • • •

  From the sidewalk I could see the cardboard box on the porch, waiting for me. Letty King sat next to it on the porch glider.

  “I bet you thought I’d forget,” she said, without saying hello.

  The thought had crossed my mind, but I didn’t say so. “Hello, Mrs. King.”

  “I called my son to get it down from the attic,” she said. “But you’ll have to get it into your car.”

  I gulped. “But, Mrs. King, I told you I don’t have three thousand dollars.”

  “That’s the problem with you people,” she said, but she didn’t say what the problem was or which people she meant. “It’s worthless. Worthless junk. Library doesn’t want any queer letters. They’ll rot in my attic. My son could care less about them. So go ahead, get them out of here. I’ll be glad to be rid of them. Save me the trouble of throwing them out.”

  I hesitated, one foot on the porch, the other on the steps ready to beat a retreat. “And what about your sister?” I asked.

  “Haven’t seen her since 1967,” she said. “You tell her . . . you tell her she owes me a few Christmas presents.”

  I reached over and touched the side of the box timidly. There was a perfect spot for it in the car right in the back. If I’d bought any more inventory, it wouldn’t have fit. I could see it there now, riding comfortably back to Manhattan. I could hear myself calling Catherine to tell her the news. I could see my renewed self-confidence mirrored in her eyes.