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_For obvious reasons, since time-travel has yet to be invented as
far as we know, science fiction authors usually attribute it to the
future. Yet there is always the possibility that somewhere, somehow,
somewhen, it has already been put to use. A possibility which Sammy
Merwin here considers in highly intriguing and human terms. Let's go
back with Coulter...._
a
world
apart
_by ... Sam Merwin, Jr._
Most men of middle age would welcome
a chance to live their lives a second
time. But Coulter did not.
It wasn't much of a bump. The shock absorbers of the liquid-smooth
convertible neutralized all but a tiny percent of the jarring impact
before it could reach the imported English flannel seat of Coulter's
expensively-tailored pants. But it was sufficient to jolt him out of his
reverie, trebly induced by a four-course luncheon with cocktails and
liqueur, the nostalgia of returning to a hometown unvisited in twenty
years and the fact that he was driving westward into an afternoon sun.
Coulter grunted mild resentment at being thus disturbed. Then, as he
quickly, incredulously scanned the road ahead and the car whose wheel
was gripped by his gloved hands, he narrowed his eyes and muttered to
himself, "Wake up! For God's sake snap out of it!"
The road itself had changed. From a twin-laned ten-car highway,
carefully graded and landscaped and clover-leafed, it had become a
single-laned three-car thoroughfare, paved with tar instead of concrete
and high-crowned along its center. He swung the wheel quickly to avoid
running onto a dirt shoulder hardened with ice.
Its curves were no longer graded for high-speed cars but were scarcely
tilted at all, when they didn't slant the wrong way. Its crossings were
blind, level and unprotected by traffic lights. Neat unattractive
clusters of mass-built houses interspersed with occasional clumps of
woodland had been replaced with long stretches of pine woods, only
occasionally relieved by houses and barns of obviously antique
manufacture. Some of these looked disturbingly familiar.
And the roadside signs--all at once they were everywhere. Here a
weathered but still-legible little Burma-Shave series, a wooden
Horlick's contented cow, Socony, That Good Gulf Gasoline, the black
cat-face bespeaking Catspaw Rubber Heels. Here were the coal-black Gold
Dust twins, Kelly Springfield's Lotta Miles peering through a large
rubber tire, a cocked-hatted boniface advertising New York's Prince
George Hotel, the sleepy Fisk Tire boy in his pajamas and carrying a
candle.
And then a huge opened book with a quill pen stuck in an inkwell
alongside. On the right-hand page it said, _United States Tires Are Good
Tires_ and on the left, _You are 3-1/2 miles from Lincolnville. In 1778
General O'Hara, leading a British raiding party inland, was ambushed on
this spot by Colonel Amos Coulter and his militia and forced to retreat
with heavy loss._
Slowing down because the high-crowned road was slippery with sun-melted
ice, Coulter noted that the steering wheel responded heavily. Then he
saw suddenly that it was smaller than he'd remembered and made of black
rubber instead of the almond-hued plastic of his new convertible. And
his light costly fabric gloves had become black leather, lined with fur!
A gong rang in his memory. He had driven this road many times in years
gone by, he had known all these signs as quasi-landmarks, he had worn
such gloves one winter. There had been a little triangular tear in the
heel of the left one, where he had snagged it on a nail sticking out of
the garage wall. But that had been many years ago....
He looked and found the tear and felt cold sweat bathe his body under
his clothes. And he was suddenly, mightily, afraid....
He hit another bump and this time the springs did not take up the shock.
He felt briefly like a rodeo cowboy riding a bucking mustang. The car in
which he rode had changed. It was no longer the sleek convertible of the
mid-1950's. It was his old Pontiac sedan, the car he had driven for two
years before leaving Lincolnville behind him twenty years ago!
Nor was he wearing the dark-blue vicuna topcoat he had reclaimed an hour
before from the checkroom girl in the restaurant back in the city. His
sleeves now were of well-worn camel's hair. He didn't dare pull the
rear-view mirror around so he could see his face. He said again,
fiercely, "Snap out of it! For God's sake wake up before you hit
something!"
He didn't hit anything. Road, signs, car, clothing, all stayed the same.
Fields abridged by wooded low hills fell away on either side of the
road. The snow had been heavier away from the city and covered tillage,
trees and stone walls alike with a tracked and sullen late-winter
dark-white blanket.
He came to a hill and the obsolete engine knocked and panted. Once over
the top of the hill, he thought with a sudden encouraging flash, he
could prove that whatever was happening to him was illusion. At its foot
on the other side had lain the Brigham Farm, a two-century-old house and
barn converted into a restaurant by a pair of energetic spinsters. A
restaurant where Coulter and his parents had habitually dined out on
Thursday, the servants' night off.
He had heard a long while ago that the Brigham Farm had been struck by
lightning and burned during August of 1939. If it were still there ...
He breasted the hill and there it was, ancient timbers painted a neat
dark red with white door and window-frames and shutters. He held his
eyes carefully away from it after the one look, held them on the road,
which was now paved with a hard-packed layer of snow.
He passed an ear-flapped and baa-baa-coated farmer who sat atop a pung
drawn by a patient percheron whose nostrils emitted twin plumes of
steam. A pung! How many times had he and the other boys of Lincolnville
ridden the runners of such utility sleighs on hitch-hiked rides through
the by-ways of the lovely surrounding countryside!
Coulter maneuvered in his seat to take a quick look at this relic from
the past--and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the
windshield. He said just one word--"_Jesus!_" Nor was he blasphemous in
saying it.
He thought of Jurgen, of Faust--for in some miraculous way he had
reclaimed his youth or been reclaimed by it. The face that looked back
at him was fresh-skinned, unlined, unweathered by life. He saw with
surprise, from the detachment of almost two decades, that he had been
better looking than he remembered.
He looked down, saw that his body, beneath the camel's hair coat, was
thin. The fat and fatigue of too many years of rich eating and drinking,
of sedentary work, of immense nervous pressures, had been swept away
without diet, without tiresome exercise. He was young again--and he
almost ran the Pontiac into a ditch at the side of the road....
If it was a dream, he decided, it was a dream he was going to enjoy. He
recalled what Shaw had said about youth being such a wonderful thing it
was a pity to waste it on children. And he knew that he, at any rate,
was no child, whatever the body that had so miraculously been restored
to him.
The unhappy Pontiac cleared another hilltop and Lincolnville lay
stretched out before Coulter, naked and exposed, stripped of its summer
foliage. He had forgotten how dominated it was by the five church
steeples--Unitarian, Episcopal, Trinitarian, Roman Catholic and Swedish
Reform. There was no spire atop the concrete-and-stucco pillared
building in which the Christian Scientists held their Sunday readings.
Half-consciously he dug for a cigar in his breast pocket, looked with
mild surprise on the straight-stemmed pipe he found there. He had
forgotten that he once smoked a pipe as completely as he had forgotten
the churchly domination of his home town.
Even though Lincolnville remained fixed in his memory as it had looked
twenty years ago--as it looked now awaiting his belated return--he was
aware of many anachronisms while tooling the Pontiac slowly along
Clinton Street. He had become used to the many outer changes of the past
two decades, was unable completely to suppress surprise at not finding
them present on his return.
For one thing there was the vast amount of overhead wiring. Coulter had
forgotten how its lacework of insulation and poles took up space even in
a comparatively small community. He had long since forgotten the English
sparrows, erstwhile avian pest of America, that were to vanish so
swiftly with the final abolition of the horse.
There were more horses than he recalled, parked here and there among the
shoppers' automobiles. And the cars themselves looked like refugees from
a well-aged television movie, all straight-up-and-down windshields and
unbuilt-in fenders and wooden spoked or wire wheels. He suspected the
Pontiac he was driving would look as odd to him once he got out and
examined it.
A dark-overcoated policeman, lounging against the front of the Rexall
store at the main intersection, lifted a mittened hand in casual salute.
Coulter replied in kind, drove on through the Center, took the fork past
the old library with the skeleton of its summer coat of ivy looking bare
and chilly against the sunset breeze. The bit of sky he could see
through the houses and leafless trees was grey and yellow and cold.
The house was there, just as he had left it. It was still a good-sized
mansion in comfortable ugly space-wasting Reign-of-Terror Tuscan,
standing ornate and towered and turreted behind a fence of granite posts
connected by long iron pipes that sagged in the middle as the result of
children walking them on their way to and from the public schools around
the corner on Sheldon Street.
Coulter turned left and felt the crunch of ashes under his tires as he
drove across the sidewalk, through the fence opening, into the driveway
to the open-doored garage awaiting him. He reminded himself to be
careful of the jutting nail that had torn his glove.
The concrete floor of the garage felt cold against the soles of his
shoes. Coulter stamped his feet as he turned on the heater and moved
toward the door. It stuck--he had forgotten about that--and he swore
lustily as he exerted strength he had forgotten ever possessing to yank
it clear of the snag and across the front of the building.
He didn't want the Pontiac to freeze. Not when he had a date with Eve
Lawton.... A date with Eve Lawton.... He hadn't thought of Eve in years,
except on those occasional sleepless nights when he amused himself with
seeking to visualize the women he had known in a Biblical sense of the
word.
Most of them were faceless units in a faceless and somewhat undignified
parade. But not Eve. She wasn't pretty--not in the sense of the
doll-faced creatures that adorned the movie magazines or even the
healthy maidens with whom he occasionally rollicked since coming home
from college.
Eve had a sensitivity of feature that was a sounding board for her
emotions. Coulter paused against the garage door and thought about her.
With the knowledge of twenty years he knew now that what Eve had, or had
had twenty years ago, was the basis of beauty, the inner intangible
which stamps a woman a woman above other women....
_What in hell has happened to me, is happening to me?_ Coulter felt the
chill of the evening wind stab deep into his bones. Then he looked down
at his vanished embonpoint and patted with his gloves the flat hardness
that had replaced it. It was all right with him as long as he didn't
wake up too soon--before his date with Eve anyway.
Coulter walked around the house and in through the front with its extra
winter doorway. There was the big square sapphire-blue carpet with the
worn spot at the foot of the stairs. There was the antique cherry card
table which, to his definite knowledge, should be standing in the front
hall of his own house in Scarborough, more than two hundred miles and
twenty years away.
His mother appeared in the door of the library, edged with light from
the cannel-coal fire in the grate behind her. She said, "Oh, there you
are, Banny. I'm glad you're back in time for ... Heaven's sake, Banny!
What's all this for?"
Coulter felt himself grow hot with embarrassment. He and his mother had
never been much given to outward show of affection. Yet, knowing she
would be dead within the year, he had been unable to resist the urge to
embrace her. He was going to have to watch his step. He said, fumbling a
little, "I don't know, mother. I guess I just felt like it, that's all."
"Well--all right." She was mollified, patted the blue-white hair above
delicately handsome features to make certain no strand had been
disarranged. Then, "Did you remember to stop at MacAuliffe's and pick up
my lighter?"
Feeling lost, Coulter felt in the pockets of his polo coat. To his
relief he found a small package in one of them, pulled it out. It was
wrapped with the city jeweler's tartan paper and he handed it to his
mother. She said, "Thanks--I've missed it this last week."
He had forgotten his mother was a smoker. Coulter took off his coat and
hat and hung them up, trying to remember details of a life he had long
since allowed to blur into soft focus. She had taken up the habit about
a year after his father died of a ruptured appendix while on a hunting
trip down in the Maine woods.
He noticed the skis and ski-boots and ski-poles standing at attention in
the back of the closet, wondered if he could still execute a decent
Christie. Then, emerging, he said, "Just us for dinner tonight, mother?"
"Just us," she said, regarding him with a faint frown from over a
fresh-lit cigarette.
"Good!" he said. "How about a drink?"
"Banny," said his mother with patient sternness, "you know as well as I
that you're the family liquor-provider since your father died. I'm not
going to deal with bootleggers. And there's nothing but a little
vermouth in the pantry."
"Snooping again," he said, carefully unsmiling. Good God, it was still
Prohibition! Memory stabbed at him, bringing what had so recently
emerged from past into present clearly into focus, technicolored focus.
"I've got a little surprise upstairs in my closet."
He found himself taking the stairs two at a time without effort. Shaw
had definitely been right, he decided when he discovered the exertion
had not winded him in the slightest. He went into the big room
overlooking the front lawn, now covered with much-trodden snow, that he
had fallen heir to after his father died.
Karen, the Swedish-born second maid, was opening the bed. He had
completely forgotten Karen, had to battle against staring at her. She
was a perfect incipient human brood-mare--lush not-yet-fat figure, broad
pelvis, meaningless pretty-enough face. Now what the devil had been his
relations with _her_?
Since he couldn't remember, he decided they must have been innocuous. He
said, "Hi, Karen, broken up any new homes lately?"
She said, "Oh--_you_, Mr. Coulter!" She giggled and fled, stumbling over
the threshold in her hurry.
Coulter looked after her, his eyebrows high. Well, he thought, here was
something he had evidently missed entirely. Karen's crush was painfully
apparent, viewed from a vantage of two decades of added experience. Or
perhaps he had been smarter than he remembered.
The gallon of home-made gin was stuck behind the textbook-filled carton
on the back floor of his closet, where somehow he had known it must be.
It was between a third and half full of colorless liquid. He uncorked
it, sniffed and shuddered. Prohibition was going to take a bit of
getting used to after two decades of Repeal.
Half an hour later he sipped his rather dire martini and listened to his
mother talk. Not to the words especially, for she was one of those
nearly-extinct well-bred women, brought up in the horsehair amenities of
the late Victorian era, who could talk charmingly and vivaciously and at
considerable length without saying anything. It was pleasant merely to
sit and sip and let the words flow over him.
She looked remarkably well, he thought, for a woman who was to die
within a year of galloping cancer. She seemed to have recovered entirely
from the emotional aftermath of his father's death. So much so that he
found himself wondering how deeply she had loved the man with whom she
had spent some thirty-eight years of her life.
She was slim and quick and sure in her movements and her figure, of
which she was inordinately proud, resembled that of a girl rather than
the body of a woman nibbling late middle-age. Slowly he realized she had
stopped talking, had asked him a question and was awaiting his answer.
He smiled apologetically and said, "Sorry, mother, I must have been
wool-gathering."
"You're tired, lamb." No one had called him that in twenty years. "And
no wonder, with all that _run_ning around for Mr. Simms on the
_news_paper."
Mr. Simms--that would be Patrick "Paddy" Simms, his managing editor,
the old-school city-room tyrant who had taught him his job so well that
he had gone on to make a successful career of public relations and the
organization of facts into words--at rates far more imposing than those
paid a junior reporter during the Great Depression.
In his swell of memories Coulter almost lost his mother's question a
second time, barely managed to catch its meaning. He sipped his drink
and said, "I agree, mother, the burning of the books in Germany _is_ a
threat to freedom. But I don't think you'll have to worry about Adolph
Hitler very long."
She misread his meaning, of course, frowned charmingly and said, "I _do_
hope you're right, Banny. Nellie Maynard had a few of us for tea this
afternoon and Margot Henson, she's tre_men_dously chic and her husband
knows _all_ those big men in the New Deal in Washington--not that he
a_grees_ with them, thank goodness--well, _she_ says the big men in the
State Department are really _wor_ried about Hitler. They think he may
try to make Germany strong enough to start an_oth_er war."
"It could happen, of course," Coulter told her. He had forgotten his
mother's trick of stressing one syllable of a word. Funny, Connie, his
wife--if she was still his wife after whatever had happened--had the
same trick. With an upper-class Manhattan dry soda-cracker drawl added.
He wondered if he were going to have to live through it all again--the
NRA, the Roosevelt boomlet, the Recession, the string of Hitler triumphs
in Europe, the war, Pearl Harbor and all that followed--Truman, the Cold
War, Korea, McCarthy ...
Seated across from her at the gleaming Sheraton dining table, which
should by rights be in his own dining room in Scarborough overlooking
the majestic Hudson, he wondered how he could put his foreknowledge to
use. There was the market, of course. And he could recall the upset
football win of Yale over Princeton in 1934, the Notre Dame last-minute
triumph over Ohio State a year later, most of the World Series winners.
On the Derby winners he was lost....
When the meal was over and they were returning to the library with its
snug insulating bookshelves and warm cannel-coal fire, his mother said,
"Banny, it's been so nice _hav_ing this talk with you. We haven't had
_many_ lately. I _wish_ you'd stay home tonight with me. You really _do_
look tired, you know."
"Sorry, mother," he replied. "I've got a date."
"With the _Law_ton girl, I suppose," she said without affection. Then,
accepting a cigarette and holding it before lighting it, "I do wish you
_wouldn't_ see quite so much of her. I'll ad_mit_ she's a perfectly
nice girl, of course. But she _is_ strange and people are be_gin_ning to
talk. I hope you're not going to be _fool_ish about her."
"Don't worry," Coulter replied. Since when, he wondered, had wanting a
girl as he wanted Eve Lawton been foolish. He added, "What's wrong with
Eve anyway?"
His mother lit a cigarette. "Lamb, it's not that there's anything
_real_ly wrong with Eve. As a matter of fact I be_lieve_ her family is
quite distinguished--good old _Linc_olnville stock."
"I'm aware of that," he replied drily. "I believe her great, great,
great grandfather was a brigadier while mine was only a colonel in the
Revolution."
His mother dismissed the distant past with a gesture. "But the Lawtons
haven't _man_aged to keep up," she stated. "Think of your schooling,
dear--you've had the _ve_ry best. While Eve ..." With a shrug.
"Went to grammar and high-school right here in Lincolnville," Coulter
finished for her. "Mother, Eve has more brains and character than any of
the debs I know." Then, collecting himself, "But don't worry,
mother--I'm not going to let it upset my life."
"I'm _ve_ry glad to hear it," Mrs. Coulter said simply. "Re_mem_ber,
Banny, you and your Eve are a world apart. Besides, we're going to take
a trip a_broad_ this summer. There's _so_ much I want us to see
to_gether_. It would be a shame to ..." She let it hang.
Coulter looked at his mother, remembering hard. He had been able to
stymie that trip on the excuse that he'd almost certainly lose his job
and that new jobs were too hard to get in a depression era. He thought
that his surviving parent was, beneath her well-mannered surface, a
shallow, domineering, snobbish empress. Granted his new vista of vision,
he realized for the first time how she had dominated both his father and
himself.
* * * * *
He thought, _I hate this woman. No, not hate, just loathe._
He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a Waltham he had long since lost
or broken or given away--he couldn't recall which. He said, "All the
same, mother, a date's a date. I'm a little late now. Don't wait up for
me."
"I shan't," she replied, looking after him with a frown of pale concern
as he headed for the hall closet.
It took a few minutes to get the Pontiac warmed up but once out of the
driveway Coulter knew the way to Eve Lawton's house as if he had been
there last night, not two decades earlier. The small cold winter moon
cast its frigid light over an intimate little group of apple tapioca
clouds and made the snow-clad fields a dark grey beneath the black
evergreens that backed the fields beside the road.
As he slowed to a stop in front of the old white-frame house with its
graceful utilitarian lines of roof and gable, he found himself wondering
whether this were the dream or the other--the twenty years that had
found him an orphan. That had given him enough inherited money to strike
out for himself in New York. That had seen him win success as a
highly-paid publicist. That had seen him married to wealthy Connie
Marlin and a way of life as far from that of Lincolnville as he himself
now was from Scarborough and Connie.
* * * * *
Eve opened the door before he reached it. She was as willowy and alive
as he remembered her, and a great deal more vital and beautiful. She put
up her face to be kissed as soon as he was inside and his arms went
around her soft angora sweater and he wondered a little at what he had
so cavalierly dismissed and left behind him.