by Jack Finney
"Okay." She nodded shyly, and went into my room, and I opened the last package, a suit box, brought out the street coat I'd bought her, and laid it over the back of the davenport as a sort of final surprise for Julia. It was tan cloth, with wide lapels, a deep collar, and big mother-of-pearl buttons. All these things had been expensive but I didn't care.
Julia was gone longer than I'd thought she'd be, and doors being as thin as they are today, which Julia surely didn't realize, I could hear her little exclamations of surprise and occasional puzzlement. Then I heard her say, "Oh!" in a shocked little tone, and the next picture in my assorted memories is of Julia—following a long wait after the "Oh!"—coming hesitatingly out of the bedroom and stopping just outside the door. Her voice embarrassed, she said, "Si, you made a mistake; just look at this skirt!" and I couldn't hold it in another second, and burst out laughing. The skirt I'd bought her was tan wool, and of a really conservative knee-length. And she had it on all right. But it was tight at the waist because she'd put it on over at least two of her own ankle-length white petticoats.
"Julia, I'm sorry!" I said; she was looking indignant. "But you can't wear those petticoats; wear the slip!"
"Slip?"
"The pink petticoat I brought you."
"I am wearing it!" Her face was shiny red. "Under my petticoats, and it's much too short!"
I'd bottled the laughter up, shoved it way down inside and it was off my face completely but fighting to get out. "No, Julia," I said gravely, "the slip isn't really too short. It's the same length as the skirt; a shade shorter so it won't show." I shrugged. "It's what they wear today. I didn't design them."
She stood for a moment as though thinking about arguing it, while I kept my face rigid at the sight of a good fourteen inches of ruffled white petticoat hanging down below the hem of that skirt. Then she turned abruptly, and was gone for at least ten minutes.
She came out of the bedroom walking like a duck, arms rigid at her side; it took me a few seconds and steps to realize that this strange walk was because her knees were pressed tight together. "Is this... how it's supposed to look?"
She stood motionless for my inspection, and I stood staring because Julia looked great. The blouse looked fine at the collar, the chocolate-brown sweater was a snug but not too tight fit, and the skirt looked terrific. As I'd suspected, she had a fine figure, though I hadn't known her legs would be absolutely beautiful. High-heeled shoes, the clerk had reminded me, were out of style right now, but I'd insisted on buying high-heeled brown leather pumps, and now I saw that I was right. In sheer flesh-toned stockings, those high heels emphasizing her fine-boned ankles and full round calves, Julia was stunning. She was a spectacularly handsome girl in this outfit, and her long hair, gathered up in a bun at the back, seemed just right for it. My face, eyes, and grin showed what I thought, and it helped her; she smiled, too, in sudden pleasure and pride, and bent forward to look down at her skirt. Once more she caught sight of its hem, far far higher on those beautiful legs than she'd ever dreamed she'd wear. And her face flushed, she ran two steps to the davenport, snatched up the coat I'd left there, and as fast as she could move, she wrapped it around her waist, the bottom of the coat touching her shoes. "I can't!" she wailed. "Si, I simply cannot go out in the street like that!"
I couldn't help it; I was laughing, shaking my head as I walked over to her, and I put an arm around her shoulders, and then on impulse and without thought I kissed her. It was just a quick kiss, and she looked startled. But she smiled, and I got her to put on the coat by telling her its hem would be longer than the skirt—as it was by an inch or so. And that helped. The coat on, she looked down at herself again, and while I think she felt like running to the bedroom again, she made herself stand still. Every woman she'd seen outside, I reminded her, wore a coat just as short, and she nodded grimly, accepting it.
I walked to my room to get a felt hat from my closet, and when I came back Julia stood at the mirror which hung over the little table beside the front door, and she was tying the strings of her bonnet under her chin. This time I didn't even bother trying to hold back; it would have been useless. I laughed for a dozen seconds, unable to stop or speak, and Julia stood looking at me, not angry but baffled; and each time I'd look at her standing there frowning puzzledly in those high heels and short modern coat, wearing that ancient, flat-topped flowered hat on her head, its strings tied in a bow under her chin, the laughter got a fresh start. I didn't mean to be rude or offend Julia, and was relieved that she didn't seem angry; it was just that she'd seemed so modern suddenly that I'd stupidly thought she understood how good she looked. But of course the new outfit was utterly alien to her; she had no way of judging it. To Julia her familiar bonnet looked just fine with these strange new clothes.
But when I told her the bonnet didn't go with them, the woman she was understood instantly that it must be so, even though she couldn't perceive it, and she yanked loose the bow under her chin and snatched off the bonnet. Plenty of women went bareheaded in the street, I told her, especially with long hair like hers. She looked surprised and doubtful about that, and I said if it bothered her when we got out, we'd stop and buy her a new hat. Then I put my hands on her coat sleeves at the shoulder, and stood at arm's length looking her over, letting what I thought and felt show. "Julia, take my word for this; when we go out now, you'll be one of the best-looking women in all New York. And that's the truth." She saw that I meant it, and I watched the pleasure come into her eyes, and saw her chin lift. Then, wobbling a bit on heels an inch higher and much smaller than she was used to but managing it pretty well, she walked back into my room; there was a full-length mirror on the closet door, and I knew she was heading for that. And knew she could face going out now, and that it wouldn't take this girl long to be as pleased as she ought to at the way she looked, and I wished I'd kissed her again before she moved away from my hands at her shoulders.
Downstairs I got Julia into a cab right away, letting her get used to being out in full sight of the world a little dose at a time. Then we drove uptown on Third Avenue so that she could see the street astoundingly without El or even streetcar tracks. At Forty-second Street we turned west to pass Grand Central Station, and Julia said, and I agreed, that it was far more impressive than the little red-brick Grand Central we'd seen here last.
Up Madison Avenue, the charming quiet little street that Julia knew unrecognizable now, of course. And then to Fifty-ninth Street along the lower edge of Central Park, and once more she had the relief and pleasure of finding something familiar essentially unchanged. I hired one of the horse-drawn hacks that wait in a line beside the park on Fifty-ninth Street; I thought Julia would enjoy it. And for a while—clip-clop, clip-clop once more—we drove more or less aimlessly along the winding roadways while Julia marveled at the absence of any other horses, and at the swiftness and relative silence of the "auto mobiles." She liked the cars, thought they were far more handsome and much more interesting than carriages, and I realized she'd rather have taken a cab.
Along Central Park West, and I showed her the Dakota surrounded by other buildings now; then we drove back to the hack stand. I paid off the driver, and we walked on toward the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth. This was the corner at which I'd had my first real look, on a cold January morning, at the world of 1882, staring in fright and fierce excitement at the horse-drawn bus approaching me, then turning to look south at a narrow, quiet residential Fifth Avenue. I'd been with Kate, but I didn't want to think about that just now. I wanted Julia to see that very same stretch of Fifth Avenue in my world.
Approaching the corner, across the street from the Plaza Hotel, I said, "We're walking along beside Central Park, Julia; and that's the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth, so you know where you are." I'd timed this carefully, and now I raised my arm, saying, "So tell me—what street is that?" and I pointed down the length of what may just be the most spectacular dozen and a half blocks in the world.
She gasped, turned a stunned fa
ce to me, then looked back, and the magnitude of the change in what she saw, the assault on the senses of that sudden look at today's astonishing structures, was almost too much. "Fifth Avenue?" she said weakly, and then, astounded, "That is Fifth Avenue!?"
"Yes."
For as long as a minute we both stood looking down its length, remembering what it had been. Then Julia glanced at me, managing a smile, and we walked down Fifth, passing the shining immensities, the breathtakingly handsome and the miserably ugly architectural confections along the mile or so that at least half the people in the world have seen in actuality or on film. Those great smooth-faced buildings and walls of glass are alien even to modern eyes, and I'm not sure Julia was able to apprehend them fully, they were so divorced from anything and everything she knew. It was so nearly impossible, I think, to take in and even try to comprehend, that when she looked across Fifty-first Street just ahead, suddenly narrowing her eyes to be sure she really saw it, she felt as I once had, but even more strongly—she burst into tears at sight of St. Patrick's Cathedral standing almost unchanged in this other world. Across the street from the cathedral at Rockefeller Center—which I don't think Julia ever even noticed—there are stone benches, and I led Julia to one. Then we sat while she stared over at St. Pat's; then she looked up Fifth Avenue, back at St. Patrick's for a reference point; then she looked down Fifth to the south; then once again her eyes swung back to the old cathedral for relief. It helped convince her that she was where she was, its familiarity a comfort and reassurance, and presently we walked on. Here and there Julia found familiar old names; women's stores she'd seen last on Broadway. And we'd stop while she stared at the glittering display windows, drinking it in, fascinated by the jewelry, the clothes, the furs, hats, and shoes. I said. "The Ladies' Mile, Julia," and she nodded.
"I think I like it. I think possibly..." She hesitated, then continued, "They're very strange, but I think possibly I'd come to like these things." Once more she looked slowly up and down the length of Fifth Avenue. "Even these buildings." She shook her head. "Who could believe it? Who could ever imagine this?"
At Forty-second Street we looked at the soot-marked white building of the main Public Library, and I marveled with Julia at the absence of the great slant-walled reservoir. Then—she needed rest from looking—I took her to a small bar I remembered on Thirty-ninth Street. At first she refused to go to "a saloon," but then she accepted the knowledge that today women did many things they once hadn't done.
We had a table off in a corner away from the bar, only one other couple there, whispering in a corner. Julia had a glass of wine, I had whiskey-and-soda, and Julia relaxed. By tacit agreement we hadn't talked until now about what we'd left behind us; we'd needed relief from it, and had had it, but now again we talked of the fire ... of Jake Pickering ... of Carmody's strange behavior, and our flight from Inspector Byrnes. In this room, the sounds of today's New York a part of the very air, the names we spoke sounded odd to me, remote, even faintly comical. To have actually been frightened of walrus-mustached Inspector Byrnes who had never heard of fingerprints seemed absurd; had we really been scared or only participating in some sort of harmless make-believe? That was something of the tenor of my thoughts as we quietly talked over our drinks, and the reason I spoke with a little smile. But Julia was serious, not understanding my smile, and of course I understood that for her we were talking of a world in which Byrnes, Pickering, Carmody, and the fire in the World Building were far more real than this.
We said nothing new; we were only obeying a necessity to talk things over. Julia was worried about what her aunt would be thinking now, and hanging unspoken over everything we said was the question of Julia's future. But that needed time to work out, and I said nothing about it because I had nothing to say, though I had a lot to think about.
I had other things to show Julia, and after a while we left, and found a cab. It was still light, and I took Julia down to the Empire State Building, and we went up to the observation floor. In the elevator during the long long express ride past dozens of floors, Julia watched the floor-number panel, trying to believe we were really moving up this fast and this high, and her hand, holding mine, squeezed tight in the realization that we were. On the stone-railed open-air platform some ninety-odd floors above the earth, she looked out over the hazed city, making herself understand that here high over Thirty-fourth Street the distant greenery far ahead was really Central Park, and that the network of car-filled streets spread out far below us was really the city she'd known intimately but here no longer did. She looked out at the city, the park, the rivers. Then she looked around at the sky and pointed out a remarkable cloud; she'd never seen one anything like it before. I looked, and in a sense I suppose it really was a cloud—it had become one. High in the sky the air must have been windless, and a jet trail, its sharp edges gone, had puffed itself up into an absolutely straight, thin, mile-long cloud touched by the lowering sun. And then I, too, saw it not as a jet trail but as a strange elongated, ruler-straight cloud, and had one more glimpse of the different view Julia had of my world.
She was interested when I told her what the cloud really was; and she enjoyed her visit up here, impressed and excited by it. But presently she turned from the railing, sighing a little, and said, "And now it's enough, Si; this is all I can stand right now. Please take me home."
So instead of a restaurant for dinner—I'd meant to show off one of the nicer places—we stopped at my building's delicatessen, and I picked up some chopped steak and frozen vegetables. The vegetables—corn and some broccoli frozen hard and sealed in transparent plastic, and which I dropped into boiling water in their sacks—fascinated Julia. As we all do, she liked the easiness of preparing them, but of course the taste or tastelessness was something else, though she was polite.
We took our coffee into the living room, and, refreshed and revived, Julia said, "I've seen your world now, Si; I've had a glimpse of it, anyway. Now tell me what's been happening during all the years—it's so strange to say this—between my time and this." She snuggled back into the davenport cushions, looking at me as expectantly as a child about to hear a story.
I suppose I responded to her smile and expectation of pleasure, because—pausing to think, Where do you begin? How do you sum up decades?—I found myself hunting for good things to say. "Well, smallpox has been almost eliminated; you never see pock-marks now. And cholera. I don't suppose there's been even a case of it for years. Not in the United States, anyway." Julia nodded. "And polio—infantile paralysis. It's been just about eliminated, at least in all the big civilized countries."
She nodded again; she seemed to have expected this. "And heart disease, too? And cancer?"
"Well, no, not yet. But we're replacing hearts! Surgically removing the damaged heart and replacing it with another one from someone who just died."
"That's miraculous! And they live?"
"Well, not too long, usually. It doesn't really work very well. But it will."
"And how long do people live? To a hundred or more, I'm sure. I read a prediction in the Atlantic Monthly—"
"Actually, Julia, people don't seem to be living much longer, if at all, than in your time. Matter of fact, there are some new things that, ah—are killing us off and shortening our lives that don't exist in your time. Air pollution, for example. But we have air conditioning."
"What's that?"
"Machines that cool off the air in summer."
"Everywhere?"
"No, no; just indoors. I've got one in the bedroom—that thing in the window, if you noticed it. During a hot spell it'll cool the air to seventy degrees."
"What a luxury."
"Yeah, it's pretty nice. And they have them in most offices now, restaurants, movies, hotels."
"What are movies? You've mentioned them before."
I explained that they were like television only much larger, much clearer, and—every now and then—much better. Then I found myself talking about electric blankets,
supermarkets, radar, air travel, automatic washers, dishwashers, and even, Lord forgive me, freeways.
Julia finished the last of her coffee, picked up my empty cup and saucer, and took it with hers to the kitchen. She walked back into the living room saying, "But what's been happening, Si? Tell me about that." As I thought about it, in terms of actual events, she began wandering about the room, fingering the drapes, looking at the back of the television set, flicking the overhead light fixture on and off a few times. I was stuck for an answer. It reminded me of letter writing; you can fill several pages describing a weekend, but try bringing an old friend up-to-date with the events of the last five years, and it's not so easy. What had happened in more than a lifetime?
"Well, there are fifty states now."
"Fifty?"
"Yep," I said as smugly as though I'd created them. "All the territories are states now. Also Alaska and Hawaii. And they've changed the flag; it has fifty stars now."
Julia nodded, interested; she was poking through the magazine rack at the end of the davenport, and now she pulled out a newspaper.
"And, let's see. Well, there was an earthquake in San Francisco in... 1906, I think. The city was pretty well destroyed, mostly by the fire afterward."
"Oh, I'm so sorry; it's a lovely city, I've heard." She nodded at the newspaper in her hand. "You have a way to print photographs, I see." She put down the paper and walked to my bookshelves.
"Yes, also in color. There ought to be an old Life magazine around somewhere with some color photos. And—my God, how could I forget! We're shooting rockets into space! They carry capsules with men in them. A couple of them have traveled to the moon, and landed. With men in them. And returned to earth."
"Do you mean that? To the moon? With men in them?"
"Yes, it's really true." Again I heard the ridiculous note in my voice sounding as though I'd had something to do with it.
