Out of Time Read online

  “I thought you were closed,” he said.

  “No, temporary power failure. I locked up just to be safe,” I explained.

  He asked if I had any old umbrellas for sale, and I happened to have a few with broken ribs that would keep him at least partially dry. I guess they were Margielove’s, though they looked too small to cover her. I gave him one for free.

  “Gee, thanks,” he said, as surprised as I probably would have been to get something for free in New York. He must have felt obliged to browse through the store, because he stayed quite a while.

  Eventually, the rain became a soft drizzle and my customer came to the counter with three books. One of them was Central Park.

  “I collect things about the city,” he said, when I turned it over, looking for the price. “Souvenirs, books, postcards. You had more books than I usually find in one place.”

  I opened up Central Park, still looking for the price. I was about to give up and charge him fifty cents, like the others, when the title page flipped open in my hand. And the author’s name, unmistakably, was Lucy W. Weir. I gasped.

  “How did this get in there?” I asked.

  “It was over there with the others,” he said innocently.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “but this book isn’t for sale. It’s from my private collection. My assistant must have found it behind the counter and put it out by mistake.” Since I had no assistant in sight, and my voice was quivering a little, it must have sounded like an outright lie. But he didn’t argue. He was probably in a hurry to be on his way before the storm got its second wind.

  “Fine,” he said, picking up the others and thanking me again for the umbrella. “If you come across another copy, perhaps you could let me know.” He dropped an ordinary-looking business card onto the counter and left quickly.

  I opened up the book again. How had I missed it? I knew all the inventory inside out. Had it always been there, or had it been plopped into place during the storm?

  I closed it abruptly, with a shiver, and packed it into my knapsack to take home.

  • • •

  The box of Lucy’s papers had been standing in my apartment unattended to, just as I’d left it weeks before. With Margielove’s death and cremation and all the legal work that had followed, I had almost forgotten it. I wondered if Central Park was Lucy’s way of making me remember.

  I read Central Park almost in one sitting. It had been published in 1918. The story was very lightweight, a traditional “women’s story” about a romance between a college professor and his female student. I wondered what had happened between 1918 and 1920, when The Intrepid Ones, a much more woman-identified story, was published. I thought it must have been Harriet that had happened. The earlier book was dedicated to no one, while The Intrepid Ones contained a touching dedication to “Harriet, who knows the reason.”

  I must admit, I skimmed quite a few pages. Central Park did not hold my interest as the other novel had. I put it on the shelf with my lesbian books and expected to hear no more from it. But it had an irritating and otherworldly manner of falling off the shelf. When I had replaced it for the third time, I said out loud, in exasperation, “All right, all right, what is it you’re trying to tell me?”

  I realized, in the stillness that followed my question, that each time it fell the book had splayed open to the final chapter. It was a sentimental ending where the professor and the girl abruptly pick up and get married and honeymoon in Saratoga. Over dinner, as husband and wife, he gives her a brooch and she gives him a beautiful and expensive Italian pen that belonged to her father.

  “Write me something beautiful with it,” she whispers. And the novel ends with a smile and a squeezing of hands.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, once more aloud, and once more, only silence followed. Soon after, I decided the time had come to explore the box.

  12

  The problem was, I had no time to myself anymore. My time belonged to Out of Time. I worked from ten to seven every day. It took another hour after closing to clean up and balance the register. I could keep up with the bookkeeping when sales were slow, so evenings were theoretically my own. But I was always so exhausted from working sixty-hour weeks that I couldn’t do much but drag home some takeout food and prop myself up in front of the TV. Sometimes Catherine would be waiting for me, but more often not. We saw each other mostly on Sundays, when she volunteered to come by and help in the store. Any spare time I found I spent buying new old merchandise for the store and rooting through antiques catalogues trying to price it.

  It became apparent to me why Margielove had had to hire an assistant. And one day, on a particularly hectic Saturday just when Indian summer was upon us and the tourists were flooding the streets, forcing New Yorkers to the country or to their apartments to dig out the air conditioners they had prematurely packed away, I placed an urgent sign in the window for part-time help.

  The applicants were a varied bunch. The first was a teenaged boy who communicated mostly in grunts and who cased the joint as I talked. The second was a college girl whose ragged giggle was enough to make me say, “I’m sorry, I’m looking for someone with more experience.” There was a Latina who spoke no English. Since I spoke no Spanish, I used sign language and a map, and sent her around the corner to Amsterdam Avenue to a bodega that I knew needed help. Finally, there was an older woman, a retired salesclerk from Macy’s, who was looking for a job to supplement her fixed income. She seemed perfect, except that her short-term memory was failing. This seemed like a handicap for a salesperson.

  I had visions of her forgetting the price of something right after she looked at it and charging too little. It was funny that I expected her to err in that way, not to charge too much. She said she compensated for the faltering memory by writing everything down, which explained why, as we talked, she jotted notes into a small notebook.

  “I go through one of these a week,” she confided, “and I save them all. I have a complete filing system for them. It’s my memory, you see. If I didn’t keep them, I’d be lost.”

  And so I hired her on the spot. I liked her organization, I liked her meticulous handwriting in little spiral notebooks from Woolworth’s, I liked the way her eyes sparkled when she told me about her experience. Her name was Frances Posner, but everyone, she said, called her Tuttie. I was sure that Margielove would have hired her, too.

  • • •

  I liked Tuttie’s directness. It was so different from my own style. The second day we worked in the shop, she asked me, out of nowhere, “So, sweetheart, are you married?” She had a way, I picked up quickly, of prefacing all her questions with “So.”

  “No,” I said with a little smile. She was a chatty person, and her banter helped the slow hours go much more quickly.

  “Never been?” she asked.

  “No,” I repeated, suddenly realizing it didn’t matter if she knew I was a lesbian, since I was the boss.

  “Me neither,” she said, adding immediately, “but not because I didn’t have the offers. There was Martin Rankin and Jules, what was his name, Abramowitz, back in the thirties, just for a start, and a few others I’ve forgotten. Oh, and you probably won’t believe this, but old Mr. Dubinsky upstairs from me just last year! Can you imagine!”

  “So why didn’t you accept?” I asked, amused and charmed. I had already acquired her speaking habits, after two days.

  “Oh, he’s eighty-five if he’s a day,” she said, shaking her head. “Now what would I do with an old fart like that?” She winked at me, her whole face wrinkling up in pleasure. She had to be at least seventy-five.

  “And when you were younger?”

  “No interest,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I could never see the sense in it. I liked working, I liked my freedom. I didn’t want a husband to wait on and a baby every year. But I was no saint, believe me,” she winked again. “You know what I’m talking about, darling?”

  “Sure,” I grinned.

/>   “And you,” she continued, “a gorgeous girl like you, you must have had lots of offers in your day.”

  She took me by surprise. I had to admit I was thirty-two and had never had a marriage offer from a man, though I’d had one once from a woman, Josie Rabinack, whom I’d dated for about a month in San Francisco, years before I met Catherine. She was fifteen years older than I, much better established, and something of a butch. One night, in the women’s bar Maude’s, just as I was working up the courage to tell her we were history, she got down on one knee in front of everyone and asked me to marry her.

  “We’re lesbians,” I reminded her. “That’s impossible.”

  “I know a minister who does a service for gay people,” she said earnestly, pulling something out of her pocket. To my embarrassment it was a box with a brilliant amethyst ring inside.

  “Josie,” I said, unkindly pushing the box away, “you hardly know me.”

  “But I know I want you,” she persisted.

  After several minutes of back and forth that got us nowhere, I left her still on one knee and beat a retreat from the bar. I thought she was the type who might follow me or harass me with phone calls, but she wasn’t. My hope is that she met someone else that night at the bar, took her home, and had the amethyst ring adjusted for her shortly thereafter.

  “Well,” I answered Tuttie, “just one actually.” And then, when that didn’t seem to be enough of an answer, I added quickly, “I’m a lesbian.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if I’d said nothing more than the time of day. “Honey, you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. You know, sometimes I see young girls on the street, about your age, holding hands, and I wonder why that never occurred to me.” She broke off with a shrug. “Who can say? So,” she grinned as a customer walked in, “you’ll have to tell me all about it sometime.”

  I smiled and admired her as she adeptly engaged the customer in conversation. Within minutes she knew his whole life story and had sold him a couple of carpenter’s planes as well.

  • • •

  In a few weeks time Tuttie was ready to solo in the shop. I knew this because I watched her closely for signs of confusion or panic when her memory failed her. But she’d trained herself so well with the notebooks that she never skipped a beat. She always explained the notebook to the customers so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea when they found a short white-haired woman following them around jotting down notes.

  “Relax, darling, I’m not with the CIA, I’m just getting old,” she smiled, and held out her notebook in case there were any doubts. People in New York are more suspicious than people in other places. But customers liked her. She was a natural at sales, which was why she’d spent thirty years behind the jewelry counter at Macy’s. “Oh, sweetheart, that’s such a gorgeous piece! You have such good taste. That one’s my personal favorite,” she’d say of practically every item in the shop. But she said it with a slight, feathery touch of the hand and an honest look that meant she believed it. To her, the entire store was gorgeous.

  I loved her stories about selling. She worked at Gimbel’s during World War II, behind the candy counter. “Honey, I got to know right away who had money to spend and who was all show. The rich ones from the Upper East Side, they’d come in loaded down with furs and jewels and they’d buy fifty cents’ worth of chocolate-covered cherries and say ‘Charge it!’ Then they’d want you to put it in a box and wrap it to boot! Then these old ladies, these old babushkas would come in and buy five, ten dollars’ worth of candy for their grandsons overseas. And pay cash. They looked like they had bupkus. And they probably did. They probably just had that ten dollars to spend. So after that, lambchop, I learned you don’t rush to the rich ladies, like some salesgirls do, you treat everybody just the same.”

  She was no nonsense with me, always.

  “Sweetheart,” Tuttie said to me one day, “you spend too much time here. And now with me around you don’t need to. Go home, why don’t you? So why don’t you give that gorgeous girlfriend of yours a call?”

  So I did.

  • • •

  “Catherine,” I said. We were lying in bed, naked, the bedspread crumpled into a heap at our feet, the sheets moist from our having just had sex. “What do you think will happen to us?”

  I did not have to explain what I meant. “If I were a gambler,” she said, “I wouldn’t bet on our relationship.”

  I laughed, even though it was deadly serious. “No,” I agreed, “neither would I.” I turned toward her and propped myself up on one elbow. “Are you interested in anyone else?”

  “No,” she said. “Though maybe I should be. How about you?”

  “Sometimes it feels like I’m involved with Lucy and Harriet,” I said hesitantly.

  “Well, you are, in a sense,” she agreed, sitting up. “I mean, to the point of believing you can talk to them. That’s been the root of all our problems, hasn’t it?”

  That was not exactly true, and I was surprised that she put it so simply. We had had terrible fights about our housing situation before I ever found the scrapbook, neither of us willing to make a sacrifice for the other or find a compromise. We’d had disagreements based on our class backgrounds. I’d felt intellectually unequal and inferior to Catherine. And what had been happening between us lately clearly pointed out the differences in the way we viewed the world. Catherine, the pragmatist, had a rough time with my acceptance of the strange and unnatural. And I often had to stop myself from screaming at her to lighten up.

  “Yes,” I lied, and it started all over again. I had not lied to her since I came back from my trip upstate.

  “Why don’t we have a trial separation?” she suggested. “Just till you work these women out of your system.”

  “Do you think I will?”

  She drew a deep, sensual breath in the dark. “No, I’m not sure you will.”

  I pushed her gently down onto the wet spot of the sheets, wondering if it was the last time I would ever do that.

  13

  Bunches of letters, tied with ribbon. Some Moroccan leather notebooks, well worn. Large brown packages neatly wrapped. All precisely packed away. For history.

  The dust made me sneeze repeatedly and uncontrollably. It got into my nose and coated my fingertips with a fine layer of grey. I pulled everything out of Lucy’s box and sat with it strewn in a circle around me on my living room floor.

  It was all so neatly preserved, so carefully packaged, it was hard to imagine upsetting the order of it. The night before, lying in bed with Catherine, I was just about convinced that I should pack it all up without disturbing it, send it off to Barnard’s library with my regards, and get on with my life. But as I was making that decision, I heard a familiar voice speaking familiar words.

  “Silly girl,” Harriet said to me for the second time, “we found you.”

  And so the next day, resigned to my fate, I let Tuttie run the shop, coming in only briefly in the morning to reassure myself of what I already knew of her capability. Then I went home and after several cups of coffee, which I drank while circling the box cautiously and with trepidation, I sat down and began emptying it, one piece of Lucy at a time.

  Bunches of letters, tied up with ribbon.

  They had a sweet, musty smell, as if they’d been scented at one time but only the ghost of a fragrance remained. This may have been just a romantic notion on my part, since the return address clearly said “Miss Harriet Timberlake,” and I fully expected that someone like Harriet, whom I knew to be a seductress, would have spritzed her letters with her favorite cologne.

  The return address also said “Union Avenue, Saratoga Springs, New York,” and I was a bit surprised. I had assumed that when Harriet performed outside of New York, Lucy accompanied her. Then the most surprising thing was the postmark of 1917.

  I felt several pairs of eyes on me as I slid the linen sheets from the envelope. They rustled under my touch. I thought I heard someone draw in a deep breath, but it is quite l
ikely that that was me.

  September 1, 1917

  My dear Miss Weir,

  This salutation seems much too formal to me, it seems I know you much better than I do. Can it be that we have only spoken once at length, or have I known you in some other world? I am not a superstitious person or one who believes in other lives, but when I saw you first at my photoplay, it was as if I recognized you at once. Your glance had such a calming effect on me. I had been nervous and giddy to that point, but I suddenly had the strength to do what had to be done.

  Did you feel this way, too, that we knew each other at another time?

  I know I was miserably shy at dinner, but you are so strong and intelligent that I did not want to speak and have you think me stupid. For I am a silly girl of nineteen, who knows nothing of the world compared to someone of your stature and position.

  Yet I felt your interest in me, I felt sure at dinner that you did indeed want to be friends with me. It is only now, at some time and distance from you, that my confidence has waned.

  May I hope to be your friend?

  If you do not reply to this letter, I will understand. I may have misunderstood your attentions. I know you are very busy with your teaching and writing. I cannot wait to read your novel. I will be the first person in Saratoga to purchase a copy.

  I expect to make a trip to New York City in the next month with my mother to inquire after some acting lessons with Mrs. Theodora Winkler, a highly regarded teacher. It would please me greatly to see you then for lunch or supper, or perhaps just for coffee. We will be staying with my mother’s sister, Mrs. Elizabeth McClelland, who lives on East 20th Street.

  May I hope to see you then?

  Wishing you all the best in your many endeavors.

  Cordially,

  Harriet Timberlake

  I lowered the letter slowly into my lap. It was difficult to recognize such a young Harriet. The schoolgirl with a crush on Lucy and a lack of confidence did not match the Harriet who had seduced me in the hotel in Saratoga. What a difference a few years could make.