We heard the sound, and swung around: The little wooden bus was stopped at the curb beside us, its lantern smudged, and as we walked toward it I caught the sharp stink15 of oil. The door was at the back, just over a jutting16 wooden step, and as I opened it for Kate I glanced ahead at the driver, but he was only a motionless, blanket-wrapped figure high on an outside seat at the front, under a heavy umbrella. I followed Kate in, heard reins17 slap the horses' rumps, the bus jerked forward and we pulled out from the curb. On the following page is a sketch18 I made from memory of the moment we began rattling down Fifth Avenue on the winter afternoon of January 23, 1882. Inside, two benches ran the short length of the bus under the windows, and Kate sat down beside the rear door while I walked to the tin box up front labeled FARE 5￠. I found two nickels, dropped them in, and noticed the hole in the roof through which the driver could look to see that I did. And then we sat—there were no other passengers—heads swiveling, trying to see both sides of this alien little street at once. Half meaning it, I said, "This isn't Fifth Avenue, it can't be," and Kate pointed. Sliding past the window opposite us was a tiny curb-side streetlamp, four horizontal strips of painted glass forming a shallow boxlike frame around it, and the painted legend on the panel facing us said 5TH AVENUE. Kate was pulling my coat sleeve, and when I turned she gestured with her chin at the view behind us. "The Seventies, on the East Side," she said, and I nodded. It was true: The block we were jogging through now looked precisely19 like some of the tree-lined streets of the East Seventies in modern New York; a row of tall, dignified20 three-and four-story houses that said money, and I knew that different though it seemed this was Fifth Avenue. Between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-seventh streets, in fact, on the east side of Fifth, the houses were all of white marble and looked spectacular; and the entire block on the west side of Fifth was filled with a brick-and-gray-stone chateau21.
A gong sounded, not loud, just the touch of a clapper, and I turned and saw the source: a darkgreen-enameled22 light wagon23 just turning off Fifty-fifth Street ahead into Fifth Avenue, then heading south. Almost immediately it swung to the right into a driveway crossing the sidewalk and a strip of snow-covered lawn, and we could see the driver in profile now. He had a heavy mustache and wore a dark-blue cap with a straight absolutely flat peak, and on the side of the wagon I saw the brass24 gong I'd heard, ST. LUKE'S HOSPITAL, said the gold-leaf lettering along the green side-panel, and the wagon stopped in the curving driveway. The building—we could see it now— was utterly25 strange, big and with a long wing stretching down Fifty-fifth: the hospital. Trundling toward him, we watched the driver tying his leather reins to the dashboard, then saw him climb down—first a foot on top of the wheel, the other foot next onto the brass hubcap, then a hop26 to the ground. Now a second man, mustached and wearing an ankle-length white coat, came out to meet him at the back of the wagon. The bus windows were open an inch, and we could hear the sudden chain-rattle27 as the tail gate was lowered; then we watched the two of them slide a wood-andcanvas stretcher out the back. As we passed the hospital, a bearded man lay on the stretcher, motionless, staring straight up at the sky, a dark blanket tucked neatly28 under his chin. Turning to look back, we saw them carry him quickly up the stone steps and inside, and as we rattled29 over the cobbles past the big stone building he'd disappeared into, I sat glancing up at its tall, lean, round-topped windows. It was a strange sight to me, a hospital here on Fifth Avenue, and I thought of the man on the stretcher about to be attended by long-skirted nurses and bearded doctors. Quietly, so the driver couldn't hear, I said so to Kate, then she leaned close to murmur30, "Doctors and nurses who've never heard the words penicillin31, antibiotics32, or sulfa." I couldn't remember if Martin Lastvogel had ever mentioned this, and I wondered if, in this hospital, they even had anesthetics. In a window of a house on the southwest corner of Fifth and Fifty-third Street, I saw a sign reading ALLEN DODSWORTH'S SCHOOL FOR DANCING, then two old friends slid past ourwindows. First, on the southwest corner of Fifty-second Street: one of the Vanderbilt mansions33. I could barely remember, as a child on a visit to New York, standing35 with my father for half an hour watching as the old building was slowly smashed down to make room for the Crowell-Collier Building. It was old, stained, dirty, worn out; now here it stood in its youth, a shining chateau of clean white limestone36. Across the street from it was the Catholic Orphan37 Asylum38, and then in the block beyond I caught a glimpse of a really old friend. We sat grinning as we approached it, and Kate whispered, "I'm so glad, so relieved, to see it." I nodded. "Just looking at it," I said, "I'm almost converted to Catholicism." Because there it was, an old friend, St. Pat's good gray cathedral, looking immense, higher by far than anything else near it, but unaltered—no, it was changed, somehow: What was different? I pressed my face to the glass to look out and up, and the twin spires were—not gone, of course; they weren't yet built. We were passing directly before it now, the gray cathedral completely filling the windowpane, our own reflections swaying ghosts before it. The sight of it was so utterly familiar that it suddenly seemed as though the Fifth Avenue I knew had to exist, and I turned my head to look back up the street toward Central Park. But once more I felt the shock of it: I was staring up miles of bare-branched shade trees and houses, church spires rising to the sky high above them. I swung around to look forward—we were passing something utterly alien called the Buckingham Hotel, just across Fiftieth Street from St. Pat's—and saw still more miles of elegant residences stretching unbrokenly, apparently39, to the Battery. I realized that we'd stopped and that the door was opening. A man climbed in, dropped his fare in the tin box, and sat down across the aisle40 with a casual uninterested glance at us. Then he crossed his knees and turned sideways to stare out the window as the reins slapped and we started up again. And I sat watching him from the corner of my eye, tense, excited, almost frightened at my first really close look at a living human being of the year 1882. In some ways the sight of that ordinary man whom I never saw again is the most intensely felt experience of my life. There he sat, staring absently out the window, in an odd high-crowned black derby hat, a worn black short-length overcoat, his green-and-white-striped shirt collarless and fastened at the neck with a brass stud; a man of about sixty, clean-shaven. I know it sounds absurd, but the color of the man's face, just across the tiny aisle, was fascinating: This was no motionless brown-and-white face in an ancient photograph. As I watched, the pink tongue touched the chapped lips, the eyes blinked, and just beyond him the background of brick and stone houses slid past. I can see it yet, that face against the slow-moving background, and hear the unending hard rattle of the iron-tired wheels on packed snow and bare cobbles. It was the kind of face I'd studied in the old sepia photographs, but this hair, under the curling hat brim, was black streaked41 with gray; his eyes were a sharp blue; his ears, nose, and freshly shaved chin were red from the winter chill; his lined forehead pale white. There was nothing remarkable42 about him; he looked tired, looked sad, looked bored. But he was alive and seemed healthy enough, still full-strengthed and vigorous, perhaps with years yet to live—and I turned to Kate, my mouth nearly touching her ear, to murmur, "When he was a boy, Andrew Jackson was President. He can remember a United States that was—Jesus!—still mostly unexplored wilderness43." There he sat, aliving breathing man with those memories in his head, and I sat staring at the slight risings and fallings of his chest in wonder. The Rev1. and Mrs. C.H. Gardner's Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Gentlemen moved past our windows near the corner of Forty-ninth; at 603 Fifth, said the polished brass plate on its brown-stone front. Then just past Forty-eighth, Kate whispered, "There it is: five-eighty-nine!" I didn't understand, and she hissed44, "Carmody's house!" and I swung around in my seat to look. It wonderful: big, beautifully proportioned brownstone mansion34 with a marvelouslyornatebr(was) onzefencearo(a) und it and the tiny patches of lawn. We stared as it slid past our window, and I was baffled; I felt almost certain I'd seen it before. It seemed astonishingly familiar, then I remembered; it looked like the big brownstone James Flood mansion surviving on Nob Hill in twentieth-century San Francisco, even to the bronze fence, and I wondered if the same architect hadn't done them both. We were nearly past it, staring back at it, wondering if Andrew Carmody—alive now, years before he was to shoot himself in Gillis, Montana—was somewhere inside it. The cross streets slipped by—Forty-ninth, Forty-eighth, Forty-seventh, Forty-sixth—all strange unfamiliar45 identical streets of uninterrupted row after row of high-stooped brownstones precisely like blocks still existing on the West Side. As we'd moved down toward the thick of the city, the street became more and more alive. There they were now, moving along the walks, crossing the street—the people. And I looked out at them, at first with awe46, then with delight; at the bearded, cane47-swinging men in tall shiny silk hats, fur caps like mine, high-crowned derbies like the man's across the aisle, and—younger men—in very shallow low-crowned derbies. Almost all of them wore ankle-length great coats or topcoats, half the men seemed to wear pince-nez glasses, and when the older men, the silk-hatted men, passed an acquaintance, each touched his hat brim in salute48 with the head of his cane. The women were wearing head scarfs or hats ribbon-tied under the chin; wearing short, tight-waisted cutaway winter coats, or capes49 or brooch-pinned shawls; some carried muffs and some wore gloves; all wore button shoes darting50 out from and disappearing under long skirts. There—well, there they were, the people of the stiff old woodcuts, only... these moved. The swaying coats and dresses there on the walks and crossing the street before and behind us were of new-dyed cloth—maroon, bottle-green, blue, strong brown, unfaded blacks—and I saw the shimmer51 of light and shadow in the appearing and disappearing long folds. And the leather and rubber they walked in pressed into and marked the slush of the street crossings; and their breaths puffed52 out into the winter air, momentarily visible. And through the trembling, rattling glass panes53 of the bus we heard their living voices, and heard a girl laugh aloud. Looking out at their winter-flushed faces, I felt like shouting for joy. Within two blocks half a dozen people had climbed into the bus; one of the pince-nezed top-hatted men, several others, and then, somewhere along in the Forties we pulled to the curb, and a woman got on, walking past us to the fare box, her long skirt brushing our legs. She wore a flower-trimmed felt hat, a plain black coat, a long pale-green scarf around her neck, and the hem4 of her dress, just below her coat, was deep purple. She was a woman in her thirties, and my firstimpression as she walked down the narrow aisle past us was that she was beautiful. Hut then her coin rattled into the fare box, she turned back, and—Kate and I sat directly beside the door at the rear—she sat down up ahead. This is a drawing I've made from memory. Now I saw her face clearly and glanced quickly away so that I wouldn't offend her, because her face was scarred with dozens of pitted cavities, and I remembered that smallpox54 was almost commonplace still. No one else paid her the least attention. We passed the Windsor Hotel, the Sherwood, and then something called Ye Olde Willow55 Cottage, according to old-English sign running the width of the building just over the doorway:awoodencoloni(an) al-looking building with shutters56, a wide veranda57, and a short flight of wooden steps, like a country store. In front of it a big tree grew out of the pavement, pedestrians58 walking around it, and if Ye Olde Willow Cottage didn't date from colonial times, it sure looked it. Right next door, on this astonishing Fifth Avenue, stood Henry Tyson's Fifth Avenue Market, apparently a butchershop because I caught a glimpse of skinned carcasses hanging in rows. Street traffic had grown heavier. We were passing carriages now; and a light delivery wagon, enameled deep purple and lettered Moquin in gold script, cut around us. As I watched it, Kate touched my arm, and I turned. She was frowning, shaking her head. "Si, I've had enough. I'm seeing too much. I'd like to ... just retreat somewhere and close my eyes." "I know: I know what you mean." I stood up, stooping to look ahead. I knew we must be approaching Forty-second Street and I was unconsciously looking for the landmark59 that would confirm it, the main library on the west corner just across Forty-second. Again a moment of utter disbelief, because of course it wasn't there. Where it should have been stood what looked like the base of an enormous pyramid: tall blank walls slanting60 inward, running clear down to Forty-firstStreet on Fifth, and west on Forty-second out of sight. Martin had briefed me with pictures, and I knew what this was: the Croton Reservoir. But it was one more bewildering sight in a city completely familiar to me and now terribly different. The bus was edging toward the curb, I beckoned61 to Kate, and we got off directly in front of a two-wheeled hansom cab parked just short of the corner. I opened the cab door and helped Kate in. Settling down beside her, I glanced at her, and her head was back, her eyes closed. The driver sat in the rear on a high seat where he could look over the top, and now I heard a sound overhead, and looked up to see a panel slide back and reveal a small open square in the roof. Framed in it a moment later, I saw one eye, half of the other, a nose red with cold, and the beginnings of a large and drooping62 mustache. "The main post office," I said; then I got out my watch, pressed the stud, and the lid sprang back to reveal the face. It was nearly five. "Can you do it in half an hour?" "I don't know," he said disgustedly, and clucked at his horse, snapping the reins. We pulled out into the street. "The way traffic is nowadays, it gets worse every day, you never know anymore. We'll try it; straight down Fifth to the square shouldn't be too bad yet, this time of day. Then over to Broadway, and miss the damned El; pardon me, ma'am." My head was back, too, my eyes closed; I'd seen enough for the moment, almost more than I could take. But as the roof panel slid shut I was smiling; however different, New York wasn't really changed.
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1
rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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dwarf
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| n.矮子，侏儒，矮小的动植物；vt.使…矮小 | |
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hem
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| n.贴边，镶边；vt.缝贴边；(in)包围，限制 | |
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miraculously
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| ad.奇迹般地 | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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residential
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| adj.提供住宿的；居住的；住宅的 | |
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rattling
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| adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词 | |
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plaza
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| n.广场，市场 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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hack
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| n.劈，砍，出租马车；v.劈，砍，干咳 | |
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hacks
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| 黑客 | |
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curb
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| n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制 | |
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15
stink
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| vi.发出恶臭；糟透，招人厌恶；n.恶臭 | |
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jutting
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| v.（使）突出( jut的现在分词 )；伸出；（从…）突出；高出 | |
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reins
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| 感情，激情； 缰( rein的名词复数 )； 控制手段； 掌管； （成人带着幼儿走路以防其走失时用的）保护带 | |
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18
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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enameled
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| 涂瓷釉于，给…上瓷漆，给…上彩饰( enamel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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hop
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| n.单脚跳，跳跃；vi.单脚跳，跳跃；着手做某事；vt.跳跃，跃过 | |
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27
rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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rattled
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| 慌乱的，恼火的 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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penicillin
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| n.青霉素，盘尼西林 | |
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antibiotics
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| n.（用作复数）抗生素；（用作单数）抗生物质的研究；抗生素，抗菌素( antibiotic的名词复数 ) | |
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mansions
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| n.宅第，公馆，大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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limestone
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| n.石灰石 | |
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orphan
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| n.孤儿；adj.无父母的 | |
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asylum
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| n.避难所，庇护所，避难 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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aisle
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| n.（教堂、教室、戏院等里的）过道，通道 | |
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streaked
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| adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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hissed
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| 发嘶嘶声( hiss的过去式和过去分词 )； 发嘘声表示反对 | |
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45
unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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46
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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47
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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48
salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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49
capes
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| 碎谷； 斗篷( cape的名词复数 )； 披肩； 海角； 岬 | |
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50
darting
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| v.投掷，投射( dart的现在分词 )；向前冲，飞奔 | |
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51
shimmer
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| v./n.发微光，发闪光；微光 | |
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52
puffed
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| adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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54
smallpox
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| n.天花 | |
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willow
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| n.柳树 | |
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shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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veranda
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| n.走廊；阳台 | |
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pedestrians
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| n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 ) | |
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landmark
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| n.陆标，划时代的事，地界标 | |
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slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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beckoned
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| v.（用头或手的动作）示意，召唤( beckon的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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