“Stop,” she told me suddenly. “She is in the next room and will hear.”
In romantic tales, laughter shared by men and women invariably results in wrought-up staring, fervent embrace, and passionate kiss. Not in our case. Both of us controlled again, she merely stood and said, “You have to go now, Richard.”
“May we have breakfast together?” I asked.
There was hesitation on her part before she nodded and said, “I’ll get dressed.” I tried to feel a sense of victory at her acceptance but logic refused to allow it. I watched as she crossed to the bedroom, entered it, and closed the door.
I stared at it, trying as hard as I could to generate some feeling of confidence in my relationship with her. I couldn’t though. Standing like a wall between us was her background and her lifestyle; what she was. Which made it difficult indeed. Fantasy had made me fall in love with a photograph and travel through time to be with her. Fantasy may even have foretold my coming to her.
Beyond that, the situation was, and is, one of absolute reality. Only real actions can determine our future now.
The sign above the door read Breakfast Room. We moved through the entry arch and a small man in a crisp black suit led us toward a table.
The room could not look more different from the room it was—the room it is to be, I mean. Only the overhead paneling is the same. There are no peripheral arches, and the room is considerably smaller than I remember it. The windows are shorter and narrower with wooden venetian blinds hanging over them, and there are round tables as well as square, with slat chairs grouped around them, white cloths kept on each, bowls of fresh-cut flowers centered on them.
As we passed a particular table, a short, stocky man with kinky blond hair jumped to his feet and took Elise’s hand, kissing it floridly; an actor, no doubt, I decided. Elise introduced him as a Mr. Jepson. Mr. Jepson eyed me with unguarded curiosity before and after we moved on, not accepting his invitation to join him.
The man seated us at a table by the window, bowed to us with a tight, mechanical smile, and departed. As I sat, I saw the reason that the room looked smaller. Where I remembered sitting previously was an outdoor veranda with rocking chairs on it.
I looked aside to see that, however glancingly, Mr. Jepson’s beady eyes were still on us. “I seem to be compromising you again,” I said. “I apologize.”
“The deed is done, Richard,” she replied. I must say that she sounded calm enough about it, giving me the impression that she doesn’t permit herself to be overly disturbed by the adverse opinion of others; another point in her favor. As if she needed one.
As I picked up the napkin which was tented on the plate in front of me, I heard a man nearby say loudly, “We are a nation of seventy-five million strong, sir.” The figure startled me. In excess of a hundred million more people within the next seventy-five years? I thought. Lord.
I’d missed Elise’s question in the thought. I begged her pardon. “Are you hungry yet?” she repeated.
“A little bit,” I said. I smiled at her. “Do you rehearse today?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And—” I found it difficult to say “—your plan is still to—leave the hotel following your performance?”
“Those are the arrangements,” she said.
I looked at her in sudden, uncontrollable distress. I know she saw the look but, this time, would not permit herself to react to it. As she turned her face toward the window, I attempted to focus my eyes on the menu but the words kept blurring. For all I knew, I was thinking, these few minutes may be our last together.
No. I fought away the apprehension. I wasn’t ready to surrender yet. Relax; there’s plenty of time, I told myself. I repressed a smile. For years I’ve had those words printed on a card tacked to the wall of my workroom in Hidden Hills. Looking at them always helped not only mentally but viscerally. Remembering them helped now too. It’s going to be all right, I vowed; you’re going to make it.
No use. The menu blurred again as my despicable writer’s mind began to improvise a stark, Victorian melodrama entitled My Fate. In it, Elise departs from the hotel tonight, leaving me behind. Penniless, I take a job in the hotel kitchen, washing dishes. Thirty years from now, a doddering old, white-haired man, babbling of long-lost love, I toppie, head first, into soapy water and drown. Hic jacet, loser of the century. Potter’s Field. Dogs burying their bones with mine. The vision was so ludicrous, yet, at the same time, so horrifying, that I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or scream. I compromised by doing neither.
“Richard, are you—?”
She had just begun to speak when her voice was drowned out by a male voice saying, “Ah, good morning, Miss McKenna.”
A stocky man (are all men stocky in this time?) was approaching the table, smiling unctuously at Elise. “I do trust everything is to your satisfaction,” he said.
“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Babcock,” she replied.
I stared at him, struck by the sight of the man despite my feeling of depression. Elise introduced me and he shook my hand—and, I tell you, there are few experiences to compare with feeling the sturdy handshake of a man who has been, until that moment, long dead in your mind.
As he told Elise how “thrilled” everyone was by the “exciting prospect” of seeing the play tonight, I saw myself sitting in that hot cellar room, reading faded, typewritten letters, some of which he has not yet thought of much less dictated. The enigmatic vision, like others of its kind, proved more disrupting than not and I made an effort to dispel it from my mind.
When Babcock had departed, I looked at Elise again. Seeing her expression as she reacted to mine made me realize how little I was helping her to care for me. If I sat there in a state of gloom, she would tire of me regardless of what her feelings might be.
“I had quite a chase last night,” I told her, forcing lightness to my voice.
“You did?” A half smile, utterly beguiling, touched her lips.
When I told her about my pursuit of Robinson, her smile became total. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have guessed he would do something like that.”
“Why does he have his room on such a high floor?” I asked.
“He always does,” she said. “Using the stairs at full clip, up and down, to maintain what he calls his ‘physical vigor.’”
I smiled and almost shook my head, recalling his build. “How does he regard me, do you think?” I asked. I raised a dissuading hand before she could speak. “Never mind, I’d rather not know,” I said. “Tell me what your mother thinks. It has to be a shade more charitable.”
“Does it?” She deflected down the edges of another smile.
“That bad,” I said.
“If you really want to know—” she tilted her head a fraction of an inch and, for an instant, I recalled John Drew’s words about her graceful and compelling way on a stage “—she thinks you are a humbug and a blackguard.”
“Really.” I nodded with mock gravity. “How disheartening.” There, that was better. Surely, she preferred my bantering to an all-consuming dolor. “To which you replied?”
“That that was why I hungered for your sweetness.”
I’m afraid I gaped at her. Was she making fun of me? I thought with sudden dread.
“Don’t you know what humbugs and blackguards are?” she asked.
I blinked. “I thought I did.”
“The candies?”
“Candies?” Now I was confused.
She explained to me that humbugs are long, bright-yellow candies with a white kernel inside them and blackguards are similar candies in a square shape. As she did, I felt foolish. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m not too well informed.” Except about you and your life, the thought occurred.
“Tell me about your writing,” she said.
I felt as though politeness had prompted the question but was in no position to question motives at that point. “What can I tell you?” I asked.
??
?What have you written?”
“I’ve been working on a book,” I said. I tensed, then made myself relax. Surely, there could be no harm in telling her that.
“What is it about?” she asked.
“It’s a love story,” I told her.
“I should like to read it when it’s finished,” she said.
“You will,” I answered, “when I find out what the end is going to be.”
She smiled a little. “Don’t you know yet?”
I felt that I had gone as far in that direction as I dared. I covered tracks by saying, “No; I never know until the end is written.”
“Odd,” she said. “I would have thought you’d have to know exactly where your story was leading.”
That’s because you thought you knew exactly where your story was leading, I thought. “Not always,” I said.
“Well, anyway,” she told me, “I should like to read it when it’s done.”
Read it? I thought; you’re living it. “You will,” I told her. I wondered, though, if I would ever dare to let her read it. Time to change the subject, said my mind. “May I watch you rehearse today?” I asked.
Her expression clouded. Had I said the wrong thing?
“Could you wait until tonight?” she finally asked.
“If that’s what you want,” I said.
“I’m not trying to be unkind,” she told me. “It’s simply that I … well, I never like outsiders watching my—”
She broke off, seeing my reaction. “That’s not the proper word,” she said. “What I’m trying to say is—” she drew in straining breath “—this situation is disturbing. I would not be able to work with you watching.”
“I understand,” I said, “I know what your needs as an actress are. I really do.” That much was true at any rate. “I’ll be glad to wait until tonight. No, that isn’t true. I won’t be glad at all but I’ll wait. For your sake.”
“You’re very understanding,” she said.
No, I’m not, I thought; what I really want to do is handcuff us together.
There is little point in detailing our breakfast together. For one thing, we scarcely spoke because it got noisy as more and more guests arrived for breakfast. This certainly is an eating age. People get down to the business of digestion first thing in the morning and stay with it all day and into the night. I’d thought my stomach was about back to normal until the conglomerate aromas of ham, bacon, steak, sausage, eggs, waffles, pancakes, cereals, freshly baked breads and biscuits, milk, coffee, et al. began to engorge the air of the room. Then I was glad Elise didn’t eat much more than I did and the meal was brief.
As we left the Breakfast Room and started back across the Rotunda, she said, “I have to get ready for rehearsal now. We begin at nine thirty.”
I think I managed, for the first time, not to facially reflect the stab of dread I felt. “Have you any free time at all today?” I asked. I think my voice sounded calm.
She gazed at me as though considering my words; perhaps my very place in her life.
“If you can,” I said. “You know I want to see you.”
Finally, she spoke. “Are you free at one?”
I smiled. “My schedule is limited,” I said. “It consists of seeing you whenever I can.”
Again, that look; that vivid searching of my face as though for an answer to all the questions I knew she had. I don’t know how long it lasted but it seemed a good while. I did nothing to end it, sensing that these moments were crucial to her and that any words I spoke could vitiate them.
At last, the look vanished, she glanced toward the Open Court, then back at me. “Out there?” she asked. “By the fountain?”
“By the fountain at one,” I said.
She extended her hand and, taking hold of it as gently as I could, I raised it to my lips and kissed it.
I stood motionless, watching her every step as she moved down the Open Court; I shivered as she disappeared from sight into the sitting room. More than four hours. I could not conceive of being away from her so long. True, it was longer last night, but I was asleep.
Asleep, I thought. For the first time since it happened, I allowed myself to be fully conscious of my physical state. Closing my eyes, I offered a prayer of thanks to whatever power had touched me, for, as far as I could tell, there was not so much as a twinge in my head. There is no way I can convey the intensity of my feeling. Only someone who has had a similar experience could possibly appreciate what I felt and still feel. Yesterday morning, albeit in another time, I awoke with the usual blinding, agonizing headache, the familiar symptom of my condition.
This morning it was gone. Smiling, I strode to the desk and asked the clerk where I might purchase some toilet items. He told me there was a drugstore in the basement, off the staircase hall. It didn’t open till nine though.
For a moment or two, I had a mad impulse to ask him for a room and sign the register. Would I be able to? Or would something keep me from it? I decided, then, not to take the risk of tempting providence and, thanking him, turned and moved to the staircase.
Descending, I thought about Elise, realizing that I had thought of her only in terms of her relationship to me. I had to start thinking, now, in terms of her private existence. If I am to win her, it cannot be with presumptions of unquestioning romance. I have only known her for hours. In her background are twenty-nine years I have to deal with.
The drugstore is located where I remember a real estate office being. I waited in front of it for about six minutes before opening time. During that period, several Chinese kitchen workers passed by, talking in their native language. Finally, the clerk unlocked the door and opened it. He was a short man, dark-haired, wearing a shirt with a high collar that appeared to be made of celluloid, a thin black tie, and a high-buttoning white muslin jacket with narrow lapels. He was just beginning to grow a mustache, I saw, his upper lip looking more smudged by soot than hirsute. I realized, when I saw that, how young he was.
It was not easy to tell otherwise for, like so many men of all ages in this time, he looked extremely serious, as though he faced a great amount of hard work and knew it; what’s more, accepted it. His “Good morning, sir,” while not unpleasant, was brusque and to the point, wasting not a moment. He has a star to catch, that young man. He is what Horatio Alger would look like if there really was such a person.
While he was waiting on me—I purchased a straight razor (not out of choice but because that’s all that was available), a shaving brush, mug and soap, a comb and hairbrush, toothbrush, toothpowder, and a fountain pen—I had a chance to look around the store.
The walls were covered with advertising placards: Damschinsky’s Hair Dye; Orangeine Pain Allayer-Bracer-Cure; Bromo-Quinine for Colds; Celery / Cures Constipation—the last problem of which must be rather prevalent here considering how people eat. There were dozens of other items but there is no point in noting them all; this is not a historical account but my personal story. Suffice to say, the shelves and glass-fronted cases were crammed with bottles and boxes of every shape and size.
I looked at the wall clock and was startled to see that it was eleven minutes after nine. Hastily, I asked the clerk if there was any place nearby where I might buy some “gentleman’s undergarments”; I actually used the phrase—part of me is very much Victorian at heart, I think.
At that, I may have overdone it for the clerk seemed to be repressing a smile as he told me that there was a “Gent’s Furnishing Goods” adjoining the drugstore; he hadn’t had an opportunity yet to turn on its lights.
I quickly purchased an undersuit and socks, then, at the last moment, a white shirt and, taking out my ten-dollar note, placed it on the counter.
“Hmm,” said the clerk. “I have not seen one of those in some time.”
Oh, dear God, I thought; had I brought the wrong money? I was getting anxious. I knew I was supposed to sign the register at nine eighteen and felt a mounting uneasiness that, if I failed to do so exactly at that m
oment, something terrible would happen, the entire structure of my presence in 1896 collapsing like a house of cards.
Fortunately, the clerk made no more of the note, bagged my purchases, and gave me my change. Despite anxiety, I couldn’t help being impressed by the fact that the total amount for everything I’d bought came to less than five dollars. Shaking my head as I left the store, I started quickly along the passage, heading for the stairs.
By then, I was so nervous about the possibility of missing my registration time that when I reached the staircase, I went up it two steps at a time, crossed the Rotunda in long, rapid strides, and stopped before the desk, heart pounding. A glance at the clock revealed that it was just past nine-fifteen.
The clerk came up to me and I requested a room.
“Yes, sir, are you just arriving?” he inquired. From the way in which his supercilious gaze flicked over me, I knew the question to be one of challenge rather than curiosity; my appearance must have seemed disreputably suspect to him.
I was startled by the ease with which I lied, my story flowing out with spontaneity, unmarked by any betrayal of tone, gesture, or expression. I’d been so ill when I arrived last night, I’d been forced to stay in a friend’s room and only now was well enough to acquire a room of my own.
Perhaps the fabrication wasn’t quite as admirably mounted as I thought but, at least, the clerk did not feel confident enough to question me further. Turning away, he looked at the key slots, turning back after several moments to place a tagged key on the desk in front of me. “Here we are,” he said. “One single; three dollars a day; bathroom privileges extra. Would you care to sign the register, sir?” He extended a pen.
I stared at the key in shocked bewilderment. It was for Room 420. Suddenly, I felt disoriented again, the sight of that key stripping me, in an instant, of all the mental adaptation I’d thought I had. “Uh … are you sure?” I finally mumbled.
“Sir?”
I don’t know why that moment was so terrifying to me. I was there, in 1896. I was going to meet Elise at one o’clock and, although there was still a good deal to be accomplished, our relationship was as established as I could expect it to be. Nonetheless, the implications of that different room number were so staggering to me that I felt numbed by fear. “Are you sure this is the right one?” I asked. My tone was shaky and I know I spoke too loudly.