I wish I could say that the book he had just set down on the red brick neo-Colonial wall was some forbidden volume hoary with age, dating back at least to Nyarlathotep’s Cthulhu-contending reign. But unhappily it was leather bound and as modern looking as the wall—a guidebook to the historical antiquities of Brooklyn which Sonia had recently given him.
“We may as well go inside,” he reiterated, gesturing toward the apartment house entrance, which had a coolly inviting look. “Sonia was delighted when I told her Parkside Avenue was just a stone’s throw away to you…”
“I never seem able to keep an appointment on time,” he added, self-castigatingly. “Usually I’m a half-hour late—or more.” (He could sometimes be two hours late, as I discovered subsequently when his failure to arrive at the American Museum of Natural History at an early hour in the afternoon forced me to phone him twice, and despair of seeing him before the shadows lengthened in the Hall of Man and made the glass-encased, fossilized skulls assume a more ominous aspect.)
“I’ve never been able to rush,” he said. “It makes some people here justifiably angry and it’s something I’ll have to remedy. But long-established habits are difficult to overcome when you’ve been so long out of touch with the rushing about people can’t seem to avoid in a city like New York. No one in Providence would think of rushing so much—at least, no one on the Hill. Boston is bad enough in that respect, but New York—”
“You get accustomed to it,” I said. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But there are some things you have to take in stride, or the enormity of having everyone go into a rage will begin to wear on your nerves.”
“Some people take offense so easily—and for trivial reasons,” he said. “But I know that my lateness is not trivial, and I’ll have to make more of an effort to get to places on time.”
“What did you think of the Manhattan skyline?” I asked. It was the most trite of the many unnecessary questions which visitors from elsewhere have to endure. But I really wanted to know.
“I’ve seen it before, in some of my earliest dreams,” he said. “When I first read the Arabian Nights I was sure that pinnacles so shiningly splendid had to exist somewhere. And that made me see them, almost as they are. The reality is just a little more breathtaking, but the very shape of many of the towers against the sky is no different from the way they looked when I just shut my eyes and tried to recapture what I’d seen in dreams. I usually succeeded so well that the skyline brought back a feeling of familiarity when I saw it from the train window for the first time.”
“It’s not exactly Arabian,” I said.
“But that’s just it. It’s fabulously Arabian, in a superior way. More magnificent, more strange than any Middle Eastern skyline could possibly be. But oriental notwithstanding. It would have widened the eyes of a desert wayfarer, I’m sure, even without a jinni towering over it. I could have seen a jinni with very little additional effort. But it wasn’t necessary for me to conjure one up.”
“Well I suppose you could say all that about it,” I conceded. “But to a native-born New Yorker it doesn’t have quite that kind of associational aspect. It even depresses me a little at times, because it dwarfs the individual so much. When I think of all that massed impersonal wealth and power, my identity as an individual has a tendency to shrivel to the dimensions of a gnat.”
“I don’t give that part of it a thought,” Howard said. “I can separate the things that please me from this decadent industrial age. In Prospect Park and in what little I’ve seen of Manhattan there are scenic vistas of pure enchantment. White stone pillars and weaving boughs against a sunset sky—elm-shaded streets that could just as easily be in Providence, with just as many Georgian houses that have defied the years.”
If the conversation I am quoting seems distinctly long-winded and rather remote from the pleasure he had clearly experienced on greeting me in person for the first time, it was no different from the manner Howard usually spoke when he was carried away by anything that enabled him to travel into the past on monorails of his own imagination. And my question had provided him with an opportunity to do just that, despite his stated intention to retreat indoors from the glaring sun.
“I caught just a glimpse of those streets when we arrived yesterday, before we descended into the subway,” he went on, after a pause. “The photographs in the guidebooks I studied don’t begin to do them justice. Street after street of dwellings virtually unchanged, with no new, ugly buildings towering over them as they do further uptown. Nothing but small-paned windows and fan-lighted doorways greeted my ancient eyes for ten or twelve blocks.”
I very much wanted to meet Sonia. But I felt that if I remained silent and looked a little unhappy, the sun glare would get to him again. He had begun to blink and suddenly he was gesturing toward the apartment entrance for the second time.
“Well, we’d better go inside,” he said. “My eyes seldom give me any trouble. But today I don’t know—the sun’s hot enough to burn holes in the pavement, so I suppose that has something to do with it.”
The apartment looked just as I had imagined it would—modest but very tastefully furnished, with some interesting family portraits on the walls. Sonia was not in the living room, but I could hear her moving about in either the adjoining room or kitchen. A faint clattering sound, as if a cup or spoon had just been set down, suggested that it was probably the kitchen.
I sat down on a sofa by the window and we talked for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes longer. Then Howard vanished for an instant, and when he reappeared he was accompanied by Sonia. She was still wearing a sun-shielding straw hat and was attired in a simple print dress that set off her dark beauty in an extremely becoming way. She was far more attractive than I had thought she might be, for her amateur journalism activities alone could have made Howard overlook plainness in a woman who was able to convince him that they had many interests in common.
She came straight toward me across the room, smiling graciously, and I seem to recall that I was the first to extend my hand—an inexcusable lapse of etiquette which I doubt if I shall ever be able to overcome on rare occasions, when self-consciousness makes me unable to avoid a reflex action of that kind.
“Belknapius,” she said, taking my hand and warmly pressing it. “Howard has told me all about you. His other grandson, Alfred Galpin, I met last year. He looks just a little older than you do, but I guess that’s because he’s read Nietzsche.”
“I’ve read Nietzsche too,” I said. “Is that supposed to age you beyond your years?”
“Sonia thinks so,” Howard said. “Alfredus wrote an article about him for The Rainbow that she finds it hard to believe could have been written by anyone younger than thirty-five or forty. Even by someone the same age as the old gentleman.”
“Old gentleman!” Sonia said. “Did he always write about himself in that way in his letters to you?”
“I’m afraid so,” I told her.
“Well, he’s got to get over that. It’s just plain silly.”
“She knows how old I am,” Howard said. “Thirty-two can be quite an advanced age if you’re born aged.”
“He was no different from other children,” Sonia said. “I know, because both of his aunts told me he could go into temper tantrums and make as much trouble for people as any other perfectly normal, sweet little child.”
It was at this point that something which at first had been a mere suspicion began to lodge itself more firmly in my mind. During the brief talk by the window Howard had dwelt at some length on Sonia’s meeting with his aunts and on two other occasions