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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer
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narrow face—“Good morning, love”—and saw the same billboard out the window. No shift, no travel. Of course it was the procedures that sent me traveling at night, and I had to wait a week until the next one, but at the time I considered I might be trapped there forever. Waking each morning to have a little boy peeking in at the door, running to me. Sleeping each night with Nathan beside me. And would it be so bad?
W HAT WAS MOST wonderful about my journeys, I now believe, was that I alone could appreciate the beauty of those worlds. None of the ordinary people in 1918 found flickering gaslight quaint or beautiful, or saw the old Dutch market houses as anything but eyesores; to them, the world was both falling apart and coming together all too much. In 1941, as well, for those people it was all too modern and too old. The old billboards and funny metal sounds of life, the way that women flounced their skirts, and how men were always removing and replacing their hats, things that are gone forever; it was nothing to them. I was that visitor who comes to a country and finds it charming and ridiculous all at once. Why would anyone wear those hats? Those skirts? And why have we lost the simple decency of saying hello to strangers on the street? But to those who lived in those times, of course, none of it seemed strange. It was ordinary life, with all its troubles, and only when they were jolted off the rails for an instant did they see how odd, how beautiful, everything around them was. Jolted by love or death. They would never consider that it might disappear, or that they might one day miss the quiet Fifth Avenue snowfall that slowed their Model T, or the awful smell of oyster shells and horse manure, or the green el trains that blocked their window view. I was the only one who knew what would be lost.
“Y OUR BROTHER IS on the phone at the moment, but Mrs. Wells is in the parlor with Baby.”
I never thought I would hear that sentence in my life. But I had ceased wondering at the impossible; I suppose your eyes adjust in a looking-glass world.
“Thank you,” I said to the maid, a short blond girl with a bent nose and a Coke bottle in her hand, filled with water, that I mused must be for ironing. “Show me in.” And she did, bottle sloshing, leading me through what appeared to be my brother’s home, though without his stark sense of style. Here it was striped wallpaper and old tatted upholstery. Of course it was decorated by a woman, this wife who waited for me in some pink parlor with “Baby.”
To my surprise, I stayed in that 1941 world for nearly a week; I had to wait for Dr. Cerletti in order to travel, which meant I awoke in a new world only every Thursday and Friday. As I would later discover, this gave me just a day in some worlds, an entire week in others: a day in 1918, this week in 1941, followed by a day in 1985, a week in 1918, and so on. All of my travels would follow this pattern—or nearly all.
And so here I was, at my brother’s house. Mrs. Green had given me the address without any questions and took little Felix into her care. Out the door, of course, into a world I had learned to navigate. Soldiers and sailors and children with pennywhistles silenced by mothers wielding anvil-size handbags. The subway was a bit of a puzzle, as I had nearly forgotten the difference among the IRT, IND, and BMT lines, and how one bought a ticket, but I was no more mystified than the excitable French couple fumbling with coins that, with their Indian heads and Mercurys, were as exotic to me as to them. On the dark green–painted train I sat beside a tired shopgirl, her best peacock dress faded from too much washing and pressing, her feather boa limp as an eel, removing her shoes in the car with an audible sigh. And navy men everywhere, red faced, eager eyed, and watchful, rolling with the turns of the car as with the roll of their ships, resting powerful farm-boy hands on their clean white pants. When the
W HAT WAS MOST wonderful about my journeys, I now believe, was that I alone could appreciate the beauty of those worlds. None of the ordinary people in 1918 found flickering gaslight quaint or beautiful, or saw the old Dutch market houses as anything but eyesores; to them, the world was both falling apart and coming together all too much. In 1941, as well, for those people it was all too modern and too old. The old billboards and funny metal sounds of life, the way that women flounced their skirts, and how men were always removing and replacing their hats, things that are gone forever; it was nothing to them. I was that visitor who comes to a country and finds it charming and ridiculous all at once. Why would anyone wear those hats? Those skirts? And why have we lost the simple decency of saying hello to strangers on the street? But to those who lived in those times, of course, none of it seemed strange. It was ordinary life, with all its troubles, and only when they were jolted off the rails for an instant did they see how odd, how beautiful, everything around them was. Jolted by love or death. They would never consider that it might disappear, or that they might one day miss the quiet Fifth Avenue snowfall that slowed their Model T, or the awful smell of oyster shells and horse manure, or the green el trains that blocked their window view. I was the only one who knew what would be lost.
“Y OUR BROTHER IS on the phone at the moment, but Mrs. Wells is in the parlor with Baby.”
I never thought I would hear that sentence in my life. But I had ceased wondering at the impossible; I suppose your eyes adjust in a looking-glass world.
“Thank you,” I said to the maid, a short blond girl with a bent nose and a Coke bottle in her hand, filled with water, that I mused must be for ironing. “Show me in.” And she did, bottle sloshing, leading me through what appeared to be my brother’s home, though without his stark sense of style. Here it was striped wallpaper and old tatted upholstery. Of course it was decorated by a woman, this wife who waited for me in some pink parlor with “Baby.”
To my surprise, I stayed in that 1941 world for nearly a week; I had to wait for Dr. Cerletti in order to travel, which meant I awoke in a new world only every Thursday and Friday. As I would later discover, this gave me just a day in some worlds, an entire week in others: a day in 1918, this week in 1941, followed by a day in 1985, a week in 1918, and so on. All of my travels would follow this pattern—or nearly all.
And so here I was, at my brother’s house. Mrs. Green had given me the address without any questions and took little Felix into her care. Out the door, of course, into a world I had learned to navigate. Soldiers and sailors and children with pennywhistles silenced by mothers wielding anvil-size handbags. The subway was a bit of a puzzle, as I had nearly forgotten the difference among the IRT, IND, and BMT lines, and how one bought a ticket, but I was no more mystified than the excitable French couple fumbling with coins that, with their Indian heads and Mercurys, were as exotic to me as to them. On the dark green–painted train I sat beside a tired shopgirl, her best peacock dress faded from too much washing and pressing, her feather boa limp as an eel, removing her shoes in the car with an audible sigh. And navy men everywhere, red faced, eager eyed, and watchful, rolling with the turns of the car as with the roll of their ships, resting powerful farm-boy hands on their clean white pants. When the
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